Visualising Lived Experience: Mapping the soundscape of an after-school Minecraft Club

This article demonstrates the power of employing alternative, interpretative analysis techniques in ethnographic work. I argue for the role of sensory interpretation as a valid and necessary method of analytical enquiry, particularly to challenge existing dominant, primarily written discourses that often strive for unrealistic empirical objectivity. In order to make this argument, I demonstrate a combined sonic / visual, interpretative approach to analysis, developed to explore the lived experience of a group of children in an after-school club that took place in and around the world-building videogame Minecraft. Here, inspired by principles of Arts-based Research (ABR) which position art as a means of ‘investigation and knowing’ (Pentassuglia, 2017: 3), I employ interpretative drawing as an analytical move. Underpinned by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 12) I produce a ‘map’ of soundscape data, as a means of exploring potentially side-lined aspects of lived experience through a process of resemiotisation or transduction (Bezemer and Kress, 2008). Developing this sonic / visual approach in context, a process which had an impact on both the analyst and the analysis, helped to shed new light on the site under investigation. As such, this article builds on other analyses of sound in children’s social and educational experience by proposing that interpretative, visual responses to soundscape data can add value to otherwise purely written, or purely sonic, accounts.