Sociology And Visual Representation

With technological developments transforming our culture into a more visual one, this book sets a new standard for visual sociology. In this, Chaplin examines still images, diagrams and the visual representation of the written text.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Insights into culture and society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing visible behavior of people and material products of culture. This book provides scholars, students, artists and professionals with a systematic and analytical presentation and discussion of methods and techniques to visually study and communicate culture and society.

Visual Research Methods: Image, Society, and Representation translates abstract concepts into visually-compelling elements of everyday life. Differing from photographs as illustration, this edited volume synthesizes images with analytic questions about the world "out there." Editor Gregory C. Stanczak crisscrosses disciplines in ways that highlight the multiple manifestations of a new interdisciplinary trend.

The value of multi-disciplinary research lies in the exchange of ideas and methods across the traditional boundaries between areas of study. It could be argued that many of the advances in science and engineering take place because the ideas, methods and the tools of thought from one discipline become re-applied in another. The topic of "the visual" has become increasingly important as advances in technology have led to multi-media and multi-modal representations, and extended the range and scope of visual representation and interpretation in our lives. Under this broad heading there are many different perspectives and approaches, from across the entire spectrum of human knolwedge and activity. The editors and authors of this book aim to break down cross-disciplinary barriers, by bringing together people working in a wide variety of disciplines where visual representations and interpretations are exploited. Contributions come from researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations in a wide variety of areas, including art history, biology, clinical science, cognitive science, computer science, design, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, and sociology. The book provides a forum for wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary contributions on visual representations and interpretations. * Contributors include researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations * Content spans a wide variety of areas including but not limited to biology, sociology, and computer science * Discusses how new technology has affected "the visual" representation of information

The role of representation in the production of technoscientific knowledge has become a subject of great interest in recent years. In this book, sociologist and art critic Kathryn Henderson offers a new perspective on this topic by exploring the impact of computer graphic systems on the visual culture of engineering design. Henderson shows how designers use drawings both to organize work and knowledge and to recruit and organize resources, political support, and power. Henderson's analysis of the collective nature of knowledge in technical design work is based on her participant observation of practices in two industrial settings. In one she follows the evolution of a turbine engine package from design to production, and in the other she examines the development of an innovative surgical tool. In both cases she describes the messy realities of design practice, including the mixed use of the worlds of paper and computer graphics. One of the goals of the book is to lay a practice-informed groundwork for the creation of more usable computer tools. Henderson also explores the relationship between the historical development of engineering as a profession and the standardization of engineering knowledge, and then addresses the question: Just what is high technology, and how does its affect the extent to which people will allow their working habits to be disrupted and restructured? Finally, to help explain why visual representations are so powerful, Henderson develops the concept of "metaindexicality"—the ability of a visual representation, used interactively, to combine many diverse levels of knowledge and thus to serve as a meeting ground (and sometimes battleground) for many types of workers.

In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a hitherto unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data. The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration. Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.

This book provides a user-friendly guide to the expanding scope of visual sociology, through a discussion of a broad range of visual material, and reflections on how such material can be studied sociologically. The chapters draw on specific case-study examples that examine the complexity of the hyper-visual social world we live in, exploring three domains of the ‘relational image’: the urban, social media, and the aerial. Zuev and Bratchford tackle issues such as visual politics and surveillance, practices of visual production and visibility, analysing the changing nature of the visual. They review a range of methods which can be used by researchers in the social sciences, utilising new media and their visual interfaces, while also assessing the changing nature of visuality. This concise overview will be of use to students and researchers aiming to adopt visual methods and theories in their own subject areas such as sociology, visual culture and related courses in photography, new-media and visual studies.