Prof. Nancy Van House
vanhouse@ischool.berkeley.edu
With Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo research) Elizabeth will join us as her responsibilities at Yahoo permit.
Wednesdays 9:30 (NOT 9:40) to 12:00
205 South Hall

Interviews and direct observation activity are heavily used in both the business world and academia, for applied and academic research. Video, audio, or photographic records of people performing everyday activities or interacting with existing or new technologies, are used increasingly in both applied and academic research.

However, our knowledge about how to effectively use these records as data for analysis and for summarizing and reporting findings trails far behind our ability to create hours and gigabytes of video, audio, and still images.

In this seminar, we will address theoretical and practical issues of creating narratives using video, audio, and still images. We will read from areas such as visual anthropology and visual studies that address the nature of visual evidence; and we will get hands-on experience creating our own narrative reports.

This is not a heavy-duty media production class. We will use relatively accessible tools to practice producing examples of a range of media.

This course is appropriate for master’s and Ph.D. students from the I School and other disciplines. People in a wide variety of disciplines and professions need to collect visual data about people’s activities; make sense of it; and report it to others.

This course would be an excellent follow-on to I214, User Experience Research, or I272, Qualitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management, or an equivalent, although there are no prerequisites. This course could also be taken prior to either of these courses. For second year I School master’s students, we’ll pay special attention to the making and use of visual media for final projects and presentations.