I was on a train to Gloucester earlier this week and my eyes were drawn to the laptop screen of the woman sitting next to me: the title of the paper she was working on had ‘ethnography’ in it. We began chatting it transpired that she’s Dr. Susan Balderston, a research fellow at Birmingham University. Her current 4-year ethnographic research project is focused on women in prisons. Continue reading “Serendipity”
Working with images as a research method
1. Think of three good research questions that could be answered using this approach.
- An examination of the adoption of Microsoft’s Teams in a Year 7 cohort (researcher created data – visualisation)
- A study of the use of a new work-based ‘smart space’ (researcher created data – photo and video records)
- A week in gaming: a study of the gaming activities of five Year 6 pupils over the course of one week (participant-created video and photo diaries)2. What assumptions about the nature of knowledge (epistemology) seem to be associated with this approach?
Working with images
This week’s challenge involved working with images. There were three possible activities to choose from. I chose option 1:
Option 1: Collect and analyse images. Take a tour of your workplace or your neighbourhood with a camera, create a collage of images that represent a particular concept or theme you are interested in exploring. For example, you might choose ‘rules’ as a theme, and take pictures of things that, directly or indirectly, appear to convey rules about the space you are in; what people are allowed or not allowed to do.
The resulting collection is here. Continue reading “Working with images”
Infographics quiz
This week, I’m ‘working with images’. As part of this, I’ve been exploring data visualisations and infographics. Some of my favourites are here. Can you guess what they show? Answers are here. Continue reading “Infographics quiz”