5 Visual data analysis Flashcards
Foundations of Visual Data Analysis
At the beginning of the 1970s, when slowly but surely in the social sciences a ‘cultural turn’ took place, culture was increasingly seen as crucial for explaining social processes, social identities and social change, as well as social conflict.
Culture was seen as a meaningful set of social practices. Culture is the production, performance, exchange and negotiation of meaning. These meanings structure our society, and the way we live and behave. These meanings are conveyed through and represented by, speech, but also other forms of expression, and not in the last place also through visual media.
Images offer ‘views of the world’. That may sound very innocent and ‘objective’, but they actually also provide very specific and selective interpretations of the world.
vision
Vision refers to the capabilities of human beings to see things on a physiological level. That is, we are able to observe the light of a certain wavelength and frequency, but anything outside of that threshold goes unnoticed.
visuality
Visuality has to do with the ways in which ‘vision is constructed’, how it creates a very specific view on the world, while it intentionally neglects other aspects of the world.
Central to this notion is the observation that, when you show different people an image, there will be differences in what they see, and how they interpret the things they are seeing. Culture plays an important role in this process.
scopic regime dominated by simulations, or simulacra
The ‘real’ world seems to be hidden behind images or supposed or simulated meanings.
Jean Baudrillard (1988) described this as a scopic regime dominated by simulations, or simulacra.
Through pictures we emphasize certain aspects and neglect others, through the visual we create and make differences, and the visual becomes an instrument of power.
Images do things with us. Images have agency. But it is not just about with what intentions images are created and how they look, but also about, how images are looked at by the audience, and they interpret them.
three ‘sites’ at which the meaning of an image is produced
The site(s) of production, the site of the image itself, and the site of the audience. Each of these sites can be broken down into different aspects (or different modalities, as Rose puts it), namely technological, compositional, and social aspects.
ocular centrism
If you cannot show it, it is not believed to exist
multi-modal visual data
In many cases, images never come alone. They are very often combined with text or display elements of text which somehow set the framework for the interpretation of the image.
Reasons to use visual data in research
Images play an important and specific role in our society.
Visual data can complement other data sources, and thus help us to further underpin our conclusions. This is sometimes also called data triangulation.
We sometimes just do not have any other data available.
It can also be just very pragmatic to use visual data, for example, because they are abundantly available and easily accessible.
Three aspects of images are important for our analysis
How is the image produced? Under what circumstances and conditions? With what means? Under what kind of regime?
What does the image itself tell us?
By whom and how is it consumed and perceived? Under what circumstances? And how do they give meaning to the image?
How to do visual data analysis
Content analysis of visual data. Content Analysis is sometimes also denoted as the quantitative version of qualitative data analysis.
Semiotic analysis. Semiotics is the science of the use of symbols and signs. In semiotics, one studies systems of symbols and signs expressed in the image, and how these symbolic meanings are related to the scene which is depicted, and to the cultural context in which the image is produced and used as a means of communication.
Discourse analytical visual data analysis. In this kind of analysis, we distinguish between different levels of the context in which the image is embedded. It is cultural embedding which is the main focus of the discourse-analytical analysis of visual data.
scene description
What do we see in the image?
hidden symbolic meanings
Who made this image, and for what purpose? Who is the audience? What does it tell us about our society? What do we see? What does this image say? What is the hidden meaning?
