We will address both the practical and intellectual issues of making and using such media.  We’ll do a lot of hands-on work with photography, video, and audio recording and editing. 

This class is appropriate both for researchers (e.g., PhD students doing qualitative research) and professionals (e.g., people doing UX research and design or making and presenting media as part of other professional practice).

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Visual and other media are central to professional practice and research in many fields.  Data collection, reports and presentations, face-to-face and distant, online and off, often rely heavily on video, audio, and photography.

Because we are a media-literate society, with accessible hardware and software plus easy online distribution, it seems that everyone “knows” how to make and critique such media. However, our knowledge about how to effectively make, use, and present these media trails far behind our ability to create hours and gigabytes of content. Anyone can make media but how to do it well? An what does it mean to do it well?

In this seminar, we will address both theoretical and practical issues of capturing and creating narratives with video, audio, and photography. We will draw on photojournalism, visual narrative, visual anthropology, visual studies, and related areas.  We will get hands-on experience creating and editing our own media, while we reflect on them with the help of theoreticians and scholars in relevant areas. We will also consider how accessible media production and presentation are changing professional and research practice.

This course is relevant to students in professional schools and to doctoral students interested in and qualitative research, including user experience research; technology designers who produce video scenarios and concept videos; and anyone concerned with collecting and presenting information via multiple media.  It is particularly suitable for people doing field work, using audio, video, and still images to record and summarize their research.

Within the I School, professionals are increasingly using video, along with still images and audio, for studying users and uses of technologies, and for presentations.  (I contend that video is being over-used, as opposed to still images with audio. Video easily devolves into either talking heads, or people pointing at activity that the viewer can’t see.)

No prior experience is necessary, but students already grappling with visual (and audio) media will find this course especially useful.  We will use entry- and intermediate-level hardware and software; even smart phones and cheap cameras are now capable of producing good-quality output. Students who already have experience in these areas should find much in this course that is useful.

I School students are likely to find this course useful for the doing and presenting of final projects.