Live Sociology: Practising social research with new media
The project seeks to train researchers in the opportunities offered by the use of new media in ethnographic social research. The year long programme of five workshops combines theoretical and practical training, to develop your skills in new multi-media techniques to collect, analyse, archive, and curate ethnographic social research.
There are 20 spaces on the programme. The workshops will be convened and run by experts in new media and ethnographic research including Professor Les Back, Paul Halliday, Professor Caroline Knowles, Dr Nina Wakeford (Goldsmiths, Director of INCITE), Dr Amanda Coffey (Director, QUALITI, University of Cardiff) .
The workshops aim to bring sociology ‘alive’ by introducing interactivity and exploiting the possibilities of using new media for iterative analysis; the potential to extend reflexivity in the conduct of research; and the potential to promote collaboration, integrative methods and secondary analysis. It will survey a whole range of new options in the use of new media: how PDF (Acrobat) formats can be used to make simple interactive CD Roms including sociological text and visual work; the possibilities for redesigning the relationship between the observer and observed using digital photography; using on-line interactivity to facilitate a relationship between researchers, research participants and users.
The workshops aim to contribute to the development of ‘live’ methods of social research and the presentation of sociological research in mixed and hypermedia. They will train social researchers in the use of these media, extending the media used to communicate research to users, and contributing to debates in the research community about new forms of sociological representation in ethnography.