My blog has started to become the one places to keep and show images which fascinate me. While I've always been interested in pictures, art and photographs, it has only been through the last year while studying for my Masters degree that I began seeing beyond the image as merely something capturing and documenting a time, a person or a place. The image could be something to use as a resource for credible research.
As a somewhat researcher in training - the image and the visual medium is a way of seeing beyond, of looking both historically and at the present. Images can allow the rereading or critiquing of society, its practices and population. Nevertheless to many in academia the image is marginal, rather then considering an image as something to capture a place or a person with contemporary digital technologies and websites such as twitter and facebook allowing the mass circulation of amateur images in numbers never reached before. We are a visual society, we learn through images and everyone knows the infamous "a picture speaks a thousand words". Yet the visual within academia is a marginal medium, one criticised for undermining the scientific worthiness of a discipline - sociology especially.
I guess this marginalisation and salient acknowledgement for using the visual is what made me want to develop and use this resource within my own research., rather then merely an object to supplement the narrative. Images can trigger memories and associations, as a prop within an interview images can project perceptions and experiences a convectional interview may not. An image can create comparisons, new approaches and therefore new insights.
This blog has allowed me to publish, even only virtually pictures which intrigue me and keep my mind ticking over. I have an immense fear of my mind freezing since finishing my Masters and whatever that occurs around the corner to challenge and push my mind. One of the key semiotic thinkers Roland Barthes, a thinker who continued the original conception of this visual methodology, argued for the need of visual researchers - for that is what we become, to use images which intrigue them, images which spree them on to think, to wonder and ones which amaze them. These images I publish on here are ones which fit that category to me, they interest me, they push my mind and they allow me to continue how I think about the visual as a basis for any future research.
My ambition is to become a credible and experienced visual researcher, I know to do so and to become successful I'm battling against the criticisms of more established qualitative methodologies even of content analysis. The original marginalisation of the image within research and my own personal interest is what drives me, and I guess you should always follow where your drive takes you and challenge those that seek to judge your approach, not to battle down their beliefs upon them but to try and allow them to see other possibilities, other ways of looking outside the box, of seeing the world around them.
As a somewhat researcher in training - the image and the visual medium is a way of seeing beyond, of looking both historically and at the present. Images can allow the rereading or critiquing of society, its practices and population. Nevertheless to many in academia the image is marginal, rather then considering an image as something to capture a place or a person with contemporary digital technologies and websites such as twitter and facebook allowing the mass circulation of amateur images in numbers never reached before. We are a visual society, we learn through images and everyone knows the infamous "a picture speaks a thousand words". Yet the visual within academia is a marginal medium, one criticised for undermining the scientific worthiness of a discipline - sociology especially.
I guess this marginalisation and salient acknowledgement for using the visual is what made me want to develop and use this resource within my own research., rather then merely an object to supplement the narrative. Images can trigger memories and associations, as a prop within an interview images can project perceptions and experiences a convectional interview may not. An image can create comparisons, new approaches and therefore new insights.
This blog has allowed me to publish, even only virtually pictures which intrigue me and keep my mind ticking over. I have an immense fear of my mind freezing since finishing my Masters and whatever that occurs around the corner to challenge and push my mind. One of the key semiotic thinkers Roland Barthes, a thinker who continued the original conception of this visual methodology, argued for the need of visual researchers - for that is what we become, to use images which intrigue them, images which spree them on to think, to wonder and ones which amaze them. These images I publish on here are ones which fit that category to me, they interest me, they push my mind and they allow me to continue how I think about the visual as a basis for any future research.
My ambition is to become a credible and experienced visual researcher, I know to do so and to become successful I'm battling against the criticisms of more established qualitative methodologies even of content analysis. The original marginalisation of the image within research and my own personal interest is what drives me, and I guess you should always follow where your drive takes you and challenge those that seek to judge your approach, not to battle down their beliefs upon them but to try and allow them to see other possibilities, other ways of looking outside the box, of seeing the world around them.
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