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Using images to disseminate research findings: examples
Many of the general issues involved in disseminating research findings to non-academic audiences are discussed on the Impact Blog run by the London School of Economics
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/
Chapter 13 discussed a range of possible ways to use visual materials in order to share the results of research. The sections here include lots of examples of such materials, to give you some ideas of what is possible and what looks good. Some of the sections below also point you to tutorials for learning to make these sorts of images, and lots of the online platforms mentioned also carry tutorials and how-to videos.
You should always consider, though, the relation between what you want to convey using such materials, and the format you adopt. Don't use fancy images for the sake of it!
Data visualisation
You can watch David McCandless talking about data visualisation here
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization?language=en
His website is here
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
There are lots of sites hosting a range of data visualisations. Browse through some of:
- the site of the Swedish professor and TedTalks star Hans Rosling. It hosts a large range of interactive visualisations focused on global health, wealth, wellbeing and inequality: http://www.gapminder.org/
- an e-book of maps by Carl Lee: http://everythingisconnected.io/
- http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
- http://www.densitydesign.org/
- http://www.infosthetics.com/
- http://seeingdata.org/
The Data Collider platform from MIT's Senseable Cities Lab offers free tools for data visualisation as well as lots of examples of visualisations that have been made using it
There are also tutorials on this site
If you're interested in learning how to map data, you might find these resources useful:
- there's a nice blog post here about where to start: http://lyzidiamond.com/posts/what-to-learn-first/
- Maptime hosts a huge number of online tutorials on lots of different aspects of digital mapping: http://maptime.io/lessons-resources/
- Storymap is a free mapping software that allows you to map the locations of a series of events: https://storymap.knightlab.com/
Photo-essay
There are various sorts of photo-essays on the Innovative Ethngraphies website
http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/
There is special section in this issue of the journal Sociological Research Online on photo-essays
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/17/2/contents.html
The web plaform Storify might be understood as a digital version of the photo-essay. Storify allows you to collect anything from the web – including images of course – and put them together with your own text.
Film and video
There are various sorts of films and videos on the Innovative Ethngraphies website
http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/
Lifelines is a short film made by anthropologist Jane Dyson and filmmaker Ross Harrison. It is hosted on its own website, which carries an introduction to the film, explains something about how it was made, and also has some materials to use alongside its screenings (in classrooms for example). It's a good example of a film embedded in a website that contextualises it with information about its production process and the people and places it shows.
http://www.lifelinesfilm.com/about
Here's a film made by leadership and organisation studies scholar Perttu Salovaara “Video: Leadership in Spaces and Places.” Organizational Aesthetics 3(1) (2014): 79.
http://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/vol3/iss1/8/
It is also embedded in a website dedicated to exploring sociomateriality in leadership and organisation studies
Here are two courses which aim to teach you how to make a digital story, but they cover lots of the basics of digital filmmaking too:
- https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/digital-storytelling
- https://www.coursera.org/course/digitalstorytelling
Website
One way to use a website to share your research findings is to create a website in order to make your research data available to others. Examples of this include:
- you can find the Invincible Cities project mentioned in Chapter 13 here: http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html
- Tim Edensor's Industrial Ruins site http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/industrial_ruins/
- the 'Virtual Museum of Everyday Soviet Life' which explores everyday life in communal apartments and includes photos, audios, films and text http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/index.cfm
- an audio soundwalk by artist Jennie Savage for a London high street http://www.jenniesavage.co.uk/museum of the moment/museum of the moment.htm
- Tim Butler's Memoryscape project http://www.memoryscape.org.uk/index.htm
- the Portus archeological project http://www.portusproject.org/index.shtml
- David Campbell's project on media images of famine at http://www.imaging-famine.org/
- Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant's site 'Paris: Invisible City' http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html
- Michael Pryke's website exploring post-1989 Berlin at http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/berlin/index.shtml
- a website about a bus route through Lexington, Kentucky, by Renee Human http://liminalities.net/4-1/bus/index.htm
- and another about a bus in London, by Katrina Jungnickel http://www.studioincite.com/73urbanjourneys
- the Atlas of InterDependence is a collection of activist artwork around issues of environmental change and sustainability http://www.atlas-id.org
- the Stanford Spatial History Project has many web-based mapping projects on its site, one of which is about the biography of US comedian Richard Pryor and in particular about the town in which he grew up, Peoria: http://www.becomingrichardpryor.com/pryors-peoria/
- There are various sorts of films and videos on the Innovative Ethnographies website: http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/
A second approach to making a website is to build a more elaborate, interactive site. There are three excellent sites which host a whole range of examples of, and discussions about, this sort of project:
http://i-docs.org/ is part of the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of West of England.
- http://docubase.mit.edu/, on a site hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- https://www.nfb.ca/interactive
The list below includes a range of different kinds of interactive websites, starting with the ones mentioned in the Chapter 13 of Visual Methodologies:
- Roderick Coover's homepage is at http://www.roderickcoover.com/. This links to several of his projects.
- HighRise is a well-known example of interactive documentary. Led by Kat Cizek and hosted by the National Film Board of Canada, it now consists of several different documentaries. You can see them all here: http://highrise.nfb.ca/ For more on this project, see http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/interviews-resources/kat-cizek-on-highrise/
- Snowfall is an i-doc made by the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek For more on the project, see https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/
- Hollow is another classic: http://hollowdocumentary.com/ and http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/hollow-lessons-learned/. For more on this project see http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/interviews-resources/elaine-mcmillion-on-hollow/
- Points of View http://zzee.net/wordpress/?portfolio=points-of-view-2013 For more on this project go to http://i-docs.org/2014/09/10/points-of-view-putting-occupied-territories-on-the-interactive-map/
- Less Car More Go https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1887563980/less-car-more-go-the-cargo-bike-documentary
- Voices from the Blue Nile http://www.voicesfromthebluenile.org/. For more on this project, see Aston, Judith. “Spatial montage and multimedia ethnography: using computers to visualise aspects of migration and social division among a displaced community.” FQS: Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2010. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1479/2982
- 18 Days in Egypt http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/. For more on this project, see http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/interviews-resources/jigar-mehta-on-18-days-in-egypt/
- The Night Haunts project looks at London at night: http://www.nighthaunts.org.uk/
- Mapping Main Street http://docubase.mit.edu/project/mapping-main-street/. For more on this project, see http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/interviews-resources/interview-4-kara-oehler-jesse-shapins-on-mapping-main-street/
- Prison Valley http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/?lang=en
- Holy Mountain http://holymountain.nfb.ca/#/holymountain
- and finally, another place-based project, this one on Chicago public housing: http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/publichousing/
While many of these projects require considerable expertise in web design, there is a free programme which allows you to make interactive documentary websites with no programming at all. It's called Korsakow
exhibition
Staging an exhibition is discussed in Toolkit 02: Putting on an exhibition to disseminate your research, written by Hazel Burke, Realities/Morgan Centre, University of Manchester. This covers budgets, choosing a venue, designing and producing the exhibition content, writing materials, and publicising your exhibition.
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/morgancentre/methods-and-resources/toolkits/toolkit-2/
Using images to disseminate research findings: Exercise
Now try out the exercise for this chapter by clicking on the link on the left.