Digitalization

This entry briefly begins by contextualising the film’s history as a virtual and scientific research method. Film, as a medium of real-time representation of the actual, has historically provided a slice of the ‘actual’ from which objective and tangible data can be extracted, and then subjected to an authoritative interpretation by the researcher. As an example, this entry sketches how film, rendered as data, has been deployed as a transparent and objective method. In the case of childhood research, when film has been subjected to analysis, it has historically been implicated in materialising and constructing ‘Child Development’ in colonial ways. Digital visual research methods often uphold this legacy of verifying the ‘actual’ by systematically extracting meaning from digital renderings of real-time. This entry explores how the material and virtual qualities of digital media can instead generate alternative interpretative approaches, where relationality replaces an analytic stance that easily delineates and makes legible the subjects/objects of research. Video conferencing apps, offer an example of a digital mode that has particular implications for interpretative approaches, and which also shares some common affordances where digital methods are used in qualitative research.