Visual sociology

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Visual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life.

Theory & method

Visual sociology can be theoretically framed around three themes. Luc Pauwels suggests that the framework is based on the origin and shape of visuals, research focus and design, and format and purpose.

There are at least three approaches to doing visual sociology:

In this context, the camera is analogous to a tape recorder. Film and video cameras are particularly alive suited as data gathering technologies for experiments and small multiple interactions, classroom studies, ethnography, participant observation, oral history, the use of urban space, etc. The tape recorder captures matters that are non preserved in even the best researchers' field notes. Similarly, tape recordings preserve audible data not usable in even the almost carefully annotated transcripts: timbre, the music of a voice, inflection, intonation, grunts and groans, pace, and spacemeanings easily misunderstood but not easily gleaned from sum words alone. By opening another channel of information, visual recordings preserve still more information. For instance, the raised eyebrow, the wave of a hand, the blink of an eye might convert the obvious meaning of words into their opposite,irony, sarcasm, or contradiction. So, regardless of how one analyzes the data or what is done with the visual record, sociologists can ownership cameras to record and preserve data of interest so it can be studied in detail.

Visual recording engineering also permits us to manipulate the data. Visual recording can be used to represent other forms of recording technology and non-digital multimedia. Visual recordings clear long been employed by natural scientists because they pull in it possible to speed up, unhurried down, repeat, stop, and zoom in on things of interest. this is the the same in the social sciences, recordings facilitate the analyse of phenomena that are too fast, or too slow, or too infrequent or too big or too small to explore directly "in the life." almost importantly, through editing visual sociologists can juxtapose events to cause meanings. Sociologists may also be efficient to include cameras in places where one would not include a researcher: where it is for dangerous, or where a adult would be unwelcome, or simply to remove the observer case from particular situations, e.g., studying social behavior among school children on a playground.

Photo elicitation is another technique of data gathering. This methodological tool is a combination of photography as the visual equivalent of a tape recorder, and ethnography or other qualitative methods. Photo elicitation techniques involve using photographs or film as element of the interview—in essence asking research subjects to discuss the meaning of photographs, films or videos. In this effect the images can be taken specially by the researcher with the impression of using them to elicit information, they can belong to the subject, for example sort photographs or movies, or they can be gathered from other control including archives, newspaper and television morgues, or corporate collections. Typically the interviewee's comments or analysis of the visual the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object is itself recorded, either on audio tape or video, etc.

Photo voice is a related research method in which researchers render those being studied still or movie cameras. Research participants are taught to use the image making technology but are then responsible for making photos or movies which are subsequently analyzed either by the researchers or the participants, or both. The number one use of photo voice was by Wang and Burris published in 1994, where they defined it as "a method through which knowledge would be generated by people who were usually passive objects in the research process."

In all case, in this number one sense visual sociology means including and incorporating visual methods of data gathering and analysis in the work of sociology. This method has recently been transferred to other academic disciplines, notably having been pioneered in sophisticated religious research.

Visual sociology attempts to study visual images present as element of culture. Art, photographs, film, video, fonts, advertisements, computer icons, landscape, architecture, machines, fashion, makeup, hair style, facial expressions, tattoos, and so on are parts of the complex visual communication system introduced by members of societies. The use and apprehension of visual images is governed by socially determining symbolic codes. Visual images are constructed and may be deconstructed. They may be read as texts in a kind of ways. They can be analyzed with techniques developed in diverse fields of literary criticism, art theory and criticism, content analysis, semiotics, deconstructionism, or the more mundane tools of ethnography. Visual sociologists can classify and count them; ask people about them; or study their use and the social executives in which they are produced and consumed. So themeaning of visual sociology is a discipline to study the visual products of society—their production, consumption and meaning.

A third dimension of visual sociology is both the use of visual media tosociological understandings to excellent and public audiences, and also the use of visual media within sociological research itself.

In this context, visual sociology draws on the work of Edward Tufte, whose books Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information quotation the communication of quantitative information. Qualitatively, visual sociology can be analyzed through content analysis, semiotics, and conversation analysis. Visual sociology considers the logics of presentation of sociological and anthropological documentarians and ethnographers like Robert Flaherty, Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and Frederick Wiseman. Visual sociology also requires the coding of new forms—for example, data driven data processor graphics to exist complex relationships e.g., changing social networks over time, the primitive accumulation of capital, the flow of labor, relations between idea and practice.