ABSTRACT. Ethnocinema is a practice-led research approach based in intercultural exchange and video as method. It is one of a number of emerging intimate video methods including vlogs, social media, and everyday visual ethnography that comments on the aesthetics and politics of visuality in contemporary times. Ethnocinema brings together a range of critical sociocultural theories (Appadurai, Williams, Braidotti among them) with practice-led research strategies and tools (Harris 2014; Barrett & Bolt 2014). Unlike other video-based or video-informed research methods, ethnocinema (and ethnovideo) involve collaborative making practices amidst cultural exchange. It facilitates an exchange between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ as a creative collaboration, rather than a traditional ethnography in which video records ‘the Other’, or video as a standard qualitative tool. Informed by visual anthropology and the work of Jean Rouch, it critically interrogates the notion of culture itself, and video methods that assert truth-claims. That is, ethnocinema demands that it be used as both a method and a methodology – it is a tool, a practice, a relationship, and a critical theoretical and epistemological frame which informs the collaborative making that ensues. This talk provides instructional and epistemological foundations for those wishing to take up this method or to adapt it to new contexts.

ABSTRACT. Video ethnographers often struggle with the concepts of the public and hidden transcripts. Which narrative are participants providing to researchers? The argument can be made that as long as outsiders are present, participants will never entirely reveal what is written on the hidden transcript of their lives, especially if they are living at the margins of society—or as Paulo Freire would say: oppressed.

The session at Big Video Sprint 2017 will involve a research presentation that includes screening and discussing several movie clips produced by project participants from a study of a video-based visual methods praxis. The praxis was developed to demonstrate a novel approach to Freirean critical pedagogy and designed to foster insider-to-insider communication and dialogue, thereby limiting the observer effect outsiders have on participants, particularly in situations of marginalization. The study was initiated in two different settings in Nepal: Kapan and Godamchaur. In both settings there are several dominant narratives operating upon youth, including: the pressure to join the ranks of the urban workforce and abandon small-scale farming and animal husbandry; the negative forces of village life such as teenage suicide, alcoholism, sexism, superstition, and caste-based discrimination; the pressures to conform to traditional cultural norms in a rapidly changing world; and the loss of subjectivity. Using a process of basic movie making and analysis as a method of thematic coding, investigation, and decoding, youth participants in these two contexts crafted narratives based on generative themes that presented alternative trajectories and subjectivities. Themes were coded as stories through storyboarding, then recorded on video. They were screened using built-in projectors on the video cameras. By virtue of coding and analysis, participants were able to visualize new potential futures toward which they could direct their lives and a historical reality into which they could intervene. In this way, the praxis mirrored the Freirean method of critical pedagogy. By reviewing fieldwork undertaken in Nepal, this session will show that small-scale, affordable, and technologically straightforward video production, dissemination, and analysis have considerable scope as praxis. The outcomes of this praxis can promote a wide range of grassroots movements through the articulation of counter-hegemonic narratives. Further, this process can be amplified through the efforts of dedicated participatory action-researchers who are able to recognize the pedagogical distinction between value-based directionality and knowledge imposition. Through participatory action-research, many of the ethical quandaries faced by video-based researchers and video ethnographers can be mitigated. The study also demonstrates the subjective nature of aesthetics and narrative in video, and pilots a method that enables video data collection to occur transparently in a complex social setting.

Relevant themes:

• Critical reflections on the ‘camera’, the ‘microphone’, the 'frame' and the 'shot' in data capture • Video data collection in extreme situations and complex settings • Re-enactment, plausibility and epistemic adequacy • Aesthetics of video research methods • Emerging ethical and legacy issues • New modes for dissemination, presentation and publication of data and analysis • Critically revisiting established methods

ABSTRACT. The richness of details captured thanks to video recordings has raised new challenges for video analysis as well as for the representation, annotation, and visualization of these details. Multimodal transcripts constitute one way to make these details available for careful analysis – constituting at the same time the output of recursive analyses of the video itself. Transcripts are neither a mechanical technical record nor a preliminary tool for analysis: they incorporate an analytical vision. In this sense, the way of doing transcripts, the selection of relevant details to transcribe and their specific form of visualization (even in a textual form) is crucial. This paper reflects about multimodal transcription conventions I have been developed over the last decade, in which complex temporalities of multimodal resources play a crucial role (Mondada, 2016), and more specifically about some challenges occasioned both by ways of filming and activities filmed. Mobility is a growing topic of interest within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (see Haddington et alii, 2013, McIlvenny et alii, 2014). Mobility constitutes a challenge both for the practice of video recording – implying roving cameras that have constantly to be adjusted to their target – and for the practice of transcribing multimodality. These challenges are even bigger when considering a particular but exemplary setting, studied in this paper: large mobile groups involved in activities such as guided visits or visits of construction sites. Often multimodal transcripts are limited to embodied conducts of the speaker and a few responsive conducts of the hearer. When considering large multi-party interactions, the co-participants are often either ignored or reduced to a single party. The paper explores how to consider, and represent, within the transcript, embodied mobile details (e.g. stepping and walking movements, see Ryave & Schenkein 1974, Mondada 2014) of several individual participants, constituting/responding to some general movement of the group in an aligned or disaligned way. How a group moves/is put in movement, how individual micro-mobilities achieve collective mobility, who initiate/responds to mobile actions are interesting phenomena for the study of mobility, mobile participation, mobile “withs” (see Goffman, 1971, McIlvenny et al. 2014) – they are also phenomena exploring the limits and the possibilities, as well as the analytical relevance, of multimodal transcripts.

References Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. Haddington, P., Mondada, L., Nevile, M. (eds). (2013) Interaction and Mobility. Language and the Body in Motion. Berlin : De Gruyter McIlvenny, P., Broth, M., Haddington, P. (2014). Moving together: Mobile formations in interaction. S.I. of Space & Culture 17.2. Mondada, L. (2014). Bodies in action: multimodal analysis of walking and talking, Language and Dialogue 4:3, 357–403. Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 20:2, 2-32. Ryave, A. L., & Schenkein, J. N. (1974). Notes on the art of walking. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 265-274.

Internet Link to multimodal conventions by Mondada https://franz.unibas.ch/fileadmin/franz/user_upload/redaktion/Mondada_conv_multimodality.pdf

ABSTRACT. Technological advances have enabled digital recording of activity in new settings, with an ever-increasing quantity and variety of data. To fully take advantage of these expanded recording possibilities, tools are needed to allow researchers to combine multiple sources of data and develop new ways of analyzing the integrated data. In this talk, I will share insights gained from the development of ChronoViz, a software tool for analysis of multimodal temporal data. This discussion will address two key questions regarding tool development in this area: How can powerful and flexible tools be created to support researchers in a variety of settings? How do different visual representations affect researchers’ ability to navigate and understand data? I will discuss a number of topics related to these questions, including the co-evolution of tools and practice, lessons learned from the participatory design process, combining different visualizations to enable flexible data navigation, and using interactive visualization to enable collaboration.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we want to share the recent and ongoing experiences we have made with designing a tool for the annotation and analysis of video data. It will be a talk about how it is essential to join forces between different academic disciplines, with technologians and developers that do not necessarily understand your research and with established institutes and organisations that may give you opportunities for getting plans funded. In the case of the Advant proposal, Conversation Analysts initiated an alliance with computational linguists and with health communication researchers to propose a plan that was selected for the research agenda of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and is incorporated now in a national grant proposal in collaboration with Media Studies and the Max Planck Institute.

ABSTRACT. With FOLK, the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (Schmidt 2014a), we are building up a reference corpus of German in authentic talk-in-interaction. FOLK currently comprises 259 interactions of a wide range of genres including private conversations (such as coffee table talk and phone calls), institutional encounters (e.g. classroom discourse, workplace meetings or driving lessons) and public communication (panel discussions, public mediations). The current version of FOLK amounts to 202 hours (almost 2 million transcribed tokens) of audio data which can be retrieved online. Around 78 hours of them are available also as video. FOLK is stored and maintained at the Archive for Spoken German (AGD). It is accessible for the research community via a web platform, the Database for Spoken German (DGD, Schmidt 2014b), which allows browsing in recordings and transcripts, systematic queries on the corpus, and download of freely selectable excerpts.

FOLK is primarily intended as a resource for studying talk-in-interaction, addressing conversation analysts as one of its main audiences. Video recordings are an indispensable prerequisite for research questions to be studied based on the corpus. We have therefore developed, and continue to improve and extend, a workflow for video in interaction corpora. It includes the data-collection in the field, data-processing for inclusion in the corpus, long-term archiving, and data distribution and analysis. Our contribution to the conference starts with a discussion of the workflow elements we have developed so far, more specifically:

* Recommendations for video-data collection in the field, which addresses documentation (metadata), legal aspects (informed consent and anonymization), and specific recording setups (e.g. using more than one camera perspective). * Specifications for editing and transcoding digital video for purposes of archiving, web delivery and annotation, based on the de facto standards recommended by the MPEG group, and geared towards the "real world" conditions of our research institute, where storage space and computing power are not unlimited, and the interoperability of video with annotation tools such as EXMARaLDA and ELAN is crucial. * Guidelines, methods and tools for verbal transcription and annotation (including orthographic normalization, lemmatization and POS-tagging) of video-recorded interactions.

The central part of our contribution will be a demonstration of the web-platform's functionality for viewing and browsing video-data aligned with transcripts and for accessing excerpts from queries and other systematic analyses.

We conclude with an outlook to the most important remaining challenges and first ideas for improvements to the web platform which would enable more and better ways of qualitative and quantitative analysis of video data.

References:

Schmidt, Thomas (2014a): The Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German – FOLK. In: Proceedings of the Ninth conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14), Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

Schmidt, Thomas (2014b): The Database for Spoken German – DGD2. In: Proceedings of the Ninth conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14), Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).