Video Ethnography in Practice

Planning, Shooting, and Editing for Social Analysis

Wesley Shrum, Greg Scott

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781483377216
• eBook ISBN: 9781483377230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Video Ethnography in Practice is a brief guide for students in the social disciplines who are required to produce an ethnographic video, the most significant new methodological technique in 21^st century social analysis. The authors, both accomplished videographers, cover the basic techniques of creating a video that documents human culture and behavior with true stories of the process of videography throughout. This text shows how new technologies like smart phones, widely available video editing software, and YouTube, have turned video ethnography into something that is within reach of students in a conventional course framework.

 

1 Introduction

Once you start theorizing about what I’m doing, You stop observing what I’m doing.

Kettil Cedercreutz, Card Magician

On the way to becoming one of the most famous people in America, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed on television. The host challenged him about his style of humor: “We got so much going on in the world . . . we got this war, the economy, crime.” Seinfeld did not usually discuss such matters. He loved observing the ordinary, placing everyday life at the center of attention: “Sure it’s all going on,” replied Seinfeld. “But it’s not happening right here, right now; it’s all going on out there.” ¹

Seinfeld was wrong, strictly speaking. War and crime and “the economy” are all going on, right now, for many people in many places. They are as real and immediate as a handshake or paycheck for many in the world today. But the spirit of his reply was authentic, the same spirit animating the video ethnographic movement in social research. War and crime were not Seinfeld’s “right here.” At least not “right now.”

Video ethnography is a method, an approach to research, not a theory. In the broadest sense, a method is the application of a technology or device to some aspect of the world to produce a record of something that has happened. These traces serve as the basis for analysis and interpretation. The practice of video ethnography entails a form of heightened awareness, of sensitivity to the world around you, to possibilities and problems. As a video ethnographer, you have more tools, and more decisions to make, than a conventional, note-taking ethnographer. Not only must you decide what to see and hear, but what to record. Your authors prefer to think of this as a pure form of sociological “consciousness.” Because it is consciousness rather than theorizing, at least while you’re in the act of filming. To be sure, there is a second level of awareness—before and afterward, as you consider what you just saw, just filmed. You must retreat to be analytical, interpretive. Given the radical attentiveness your situational presence requires, you might not think much about the “why” or even the “what” of your seeing. You must observe the world closely and make decisions about whether and what to film. ² There is only one option, and that option is not theoretical. The video ethnographer must film the actions and events around her, tenaciously searching for the best audio, the best framing, the best action.

This view is hard-core, radical microsociology. Nothing really exists in the social world except the specific, observable objects and happenings of the world that you must be able, in principle, to film. “In principle” is an important qualifier. Hit men and corporate CEOs often do not permit filming. Yet this is no different than your authors’ impossible desire to film the summit of Mount Everest, since both of us fear heights. You can just as easily do a movie with a macro perspective, using voice-over explanations, interpreting the world seen before us.

This procedure—called narration or voice-over will be debated in a subsequent chapter. This might be the primary difference in a film about a factory made by a microsociologist with an interaction ritual perspective and one made by a Marxist exploring false consciousness and class exploitation. Why? Theoretical constructs cannot be filmed, at least not directly. Data collection involves immersion in a social world where people, at least some of the time, allow recording devices to capture audiovisual data. Distinctions based on theory are relevant to questions of when you hit the Record button and where you point your camera. They are not visible or audible except when you “know” what you are looking or hearing for. Reified constructs such as “society” cannot be filmed. They are inferred. Theory tells you what is important. It suggests where you want to go with your camera. But it won’t get you your shot.

Your Objective. It’s easy to confuse people. Speaking for ourselves, we have always been confused by abstract, complex objectives. So the goal of our text is simple: to make a movie. More specifically, you should complete a 3- to 8-minute movie based on 1 to 4 hours of footage. This movie, first and foremost, should help us to understand some aspect of the social world. You will not be cut loose to flounder around. Instead, you will make a good movie in small steps. The basic course assignments are to pick a subject, do some shooting, review your footage, assemble a rough cut of your film, and then finish up with trimming, music, and credits.

This chapter asks you to pick a subject, the most important way to get started in video ethnography. Even if you don’t start recording, it’s good to review your options. In the section that follows, we discuss the place of video ethnography in qualitative research and the role of technology in opening up videography to ordinary scholars and researchers. Next, we provide a small dose of theory and concepts at the core of the micro approach to social understanding. These concepts—actors, events, networks, and stories—are the components of networks that grow into large structures such as deviance, gender, social stratification, formal organizations, and nation-states. In the final section of the chapter, we ask you to get serious. Say what you’re getting up to.

A Bit of History

Methods of social research are generally divided into quantitative and qualitative. Both are legitimate approaches to examining and understanding the world of people. Most of us are inclined toward one or another. Surveys, experiments, mathematical models, and the analysis of secondary data (information collected by others) are for quantitative types—some friends call themselves quantoids. Others pore over documents with historical quests in mind or conduct open-ended interviews, following where informants and interests take them. Still others join settings for deep observations of culture (Pink, 2015). ³

Ethnography is a qualitative method, pioneered by anthropologists in the late-19th century and later used in all disciplines that aim to understand aspects of the social world. The method strives to achieve a thorough description of a particular culture, situation, or group by “telling the story of how people, through collaborative and indirectly interdependent behaviour, create the ongoing character of particular social places and practices” (Katz, 1997, p. 414). We may characterize the “classic” view of the ethnographic approach as one in which a researcher invests a good deal of time in the social world of interest, establishes rapport with key informants, and ultimately gains access to places, people, and interactions over a relatively long time. By what means does ethnography record and transmit these observations?

Classical ethnography generally used field notes. Some scholars view its history in terms of several phases (Atkinson & Delamont, 1999; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Prior to 1950, ethnography tended to follow a scientific tradition, at least in terms of how it was justified to outsiders. A second “modernist” phase through 1970 is associated with the “second” Chicago school of qualitative research based on participant observation and the theory of symbolic interactionism. The third phase yielded “blurred genres,” where the widespread reaction against positivism emphasized interpretive methodologies. Next (mid-1980s) ethnographers moved toward a new approach in which notes from the field itself were viewed as open for reinterpretation. By the late 1990s, the fifth or “postmodern” phase using a multitude of competing theories and methods merges with the visionary approach that is our primary subject.

During the same era, students of the social world began to employ visual techniques. This began with the introduction of these technologies, using the first generation of portable film equipment even before Hollywood filmmakers used it. Most video ethnographers would insist that the mere use of recording technology is not the same as the development of visual methodology. The former manipulates audiovisual technologies to tell stories. The latter entails some systematic attention to empirical data collection and analysis. Yet the science of “sociology” and the technique of “photography” flourished in the same moment in mid-19th century France. Philosopher Auguste Comte coined the term sociology, at virtually the exact time (1838–1839) that fellow Frenchman Louis Daguerre filed the patent for his method of transferring images to a silver-coated copper plate (Becker, 1974). Strangely, early daguerreotypes are notable for the absence of people since prints required such a long time for exposure that objects in motion would simply not appear.

Faster lenses soon enabled static images of people in motion and visual social documentation emerged by the latter part of the nineteenth century (Stasz, 1979, p. 122). Both early photographers and sociologists using qualitative methods documented people at the margins of social life, from immigrants to the rural poor to social unrest. Lewis Hine, for instance, was a trained sociologist and used photography to document the lives of immigrant and child workers in the early 1900s (Curry & Clarke, 1977, p. 15). But this innovative work using photojournalism in the cause of social justice did not persist. Near the turn of the century, visual images largely disappear from published sociological work in the major journals (Stasz, 1979, p. 120). Mainstream sociologists rejected visual data as they became more “scientific” and photographers themselves became personal and artistic (Becker, 1974, p. 5). Pictures were viewed as anecdotal and unscientific.

Many social researchers lost interest in new photographic technologies just as an early motion recording device was invented, the “cinematograph.” The dynamic processes of the social world could now be documented, that is, the changing aspects of the social that most of us view as fundamentally fascinating. In a repeat of the joint maturation of sociology and photography, moving pictures and social research continued to evolve with one another. But the cinematograph was large, unreliable, and difficult to operate—especially in the fieldwork settings beloved by social scientists. It was clear that for real-life settings, people needed small, reliable, and portable cameras. ⁴ A breakthrough came with the development of a small motion picture camera, an innovation immediately used to document everyday life as it happened, but in motion. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead produced multimedia studies of social life as it was lived in Bali, setting the standard for the use of visual imagery in social research. Near the middle of the 20th century, visual technology largely disappeared in social research. Once again, sociologists and anthropologists sought legitimacy in the methods and symbols of “hard science,” consigning both still and moving pictures to the realm of the subjective. Another two decades lapsed until the revival at the end of the 1960s, largely due the spread of handheld movie cameras with synchronized sound recording. As we saw during the third phase of ethnography itself, academic scholars engaged in heated debate over the scientific paradigm, revaluing case studies, personal perspectives, and social critique, often from a Marxist framework.

Ethnography derives from the Greek roots ethnos (folk or people) and graphos. The latter is sometimes translated as “writing” but also as “graphing” or “drawing.” Since the term itself inherits this reference to acts of recording and their potential for communication, it is a perfect match: The new ethnography replaces an exclusive emphasis on field notes with a more diverse toolkit of recording devices. In the 1970s, even the idea of social scientific data was transformed, such that participant observation became common, cameras and audio recorders a part of any field package. Eventually, hundreds of social researchers no longer considered the making of photographs and movies as any less scientific than collecting survey data and unashamedly referred to their recordings as data. They created professional associations of “visual” researchers, held conferences, published books, created their own journals.

Audio recording, film, and video now have a long trajectory of use in all of the social disciplines. But often recordings are used exclusively for analysis only, while the communication of analysis remains text based. In studies of work practice, where it is easy to miss much of importance, data collection and analysis often incorporate visual technologies (Kanstrup, 2002). Recording audiovisual data for analysis is increasingly common in the social sciences, often for input into standard statistical packages such as SPSS. In one well-known study, over 23,000 street segments were filmed and coded to develop measures of social disorder in Chicago neighborhoods (Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999). There was no thought of audiovisual storytelling, much less of making a movie. Instead, the data were combined with census and police records and were reported in scholarly print articles.

We are guilty ourselves. More than a decade before making movies, we spent an entire Mardi Gras directing a team that was videotaping dozens of hours of Bourbon Street partying. At the time, what seemed important sociologically was raw data for coding and ana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Not Yet
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Strategies
• 3 Shooting
• 4 Editing
• 5 Distribution
• References
• Index
• About the Authors