Visual Methods in Social Research. Marcus Banks

      About The Authors

      Marcus Banksis Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Having completed a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, with a study of Jain people in England and India, he trained as an ethnographic documentary filmmaker at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield, UK. He is the author of Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (2007) and co-editor of Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997, with Howard Morphy), and Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (2011, with Jay Ruby), as well as numerous papers on visual research. He has published on documentary film forms and film practice in colonial India, and is currently conducting research on image production and use in forensic science practice.David Zeitlynis Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985 on various research topics including traditional religion, sociolinguistics, kinship and history. In 2003/4 he was the Evans-Prichard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford presenting a series of lectures on the life-history of Diko Madeleine, the first wife of Chief Konaka of Somié village (see <http://www.mambila.info/Diko_Web/>). In recent years he started to work with Cameroonian photographers. In 2005 this led as part of Africa 05, to an exhibition of two Cameroonian studio photographers at the National Portrait Gallery, London in a display called ‘Cameroon-London’. Some images from an earlier showing in Cameroon are online at <http://www.mambila.info/Photography/Photo_Show/>. More recently he has worked with the British Library’s ‘Endangered Archives Programme’ to create an archive of the contents of the studio of Toussele Jacques, a photographer from Mbouda in Cameroon. He has long standing interests in multimedia and how internet technologies can be used to illuminate and access museum collections and archives. His work on Mambila spider divination as a ‘technology of choice making’ led to some pioneering observational work on how library users choose which books to read.

      Preface to the Second Edition

      This book aims to provide a concise account of some of the ways in which social scientists can incorporate visual images (of various kinds) into their research, together with a discussion of why they might wish to. Images may be the subject of research, (i.e. the material being analyzed) or may play a role as part of the process of analysis (or both). The emphasis is very much on the use of visual materials as one among several research methods that may be employed by a social researcher during the course of an investigation, rather than a focus on the visual for its own sake. We assume that readers already have or are acquiring the skills to devise a research project that is valid within the context of their discipline, but may not have thought of adding a visual dimension (see also below). Those who are already experienced visual researchers and are seeking to add a sociological dimension to their work should probably look elsewhere, as they will probably find what we have to say rather basic with regard to the visual.

      While intended as a simple and practical guide for students, academic and non-academic researchers new to the fields of visual anthropology and visual sociology, this is not a technical guide or a style manual for image production. For that, readers should consult the technical manuals readily available in any large bookshop, in conjunction with a more specialist text written by and for social scientists. For film and video, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor’s Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (1997) is both encyclopaedic in its detail and authoritative in its commentary. For still photography, Terence Wright’s The Photography Handbook (1999) is a relatively short but practical text, shot through with historical, psychological and anthropological insight (Wright was a professional photographer before becoming an academic). For digital media, there is no comparable text to Barbash and Taylor’s or Wright’s books, but we reference the few articles and other sources we have found useful where appropriate.

      For this second edition, the original author (MB) invited friend and colleague David Zeitlyn (DZ) to join him in revising the manuscript, as a result of many stimulating discussions we have had over the years. Although occasionally we differentiate ourselves by our initials in what follows, this second edition is genuinely a joint venture: we have revised the entire book, from this Preface to the final chapter, line by line, updating, amending, correcting and rethinking. More significantly, we have added a number of new sections and updated many of the references and examples. New or significantly revised sections include: (i) preparing for a research project with a visual component (Section 1.5); (ii) data visualization (Section 2.3.1); (iii) network analysis (Section 2.3.2); and (iv) copyright and image ethics