The Social Life of Visual Media
Instructor(s):
Prof. Nancy Van House
vanhouse at ischool.berkeley.edu
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: 110 South Hall
CCN: 42605 (3 units)
Last updated 2/11/08
These are potential readings, in roughly the order in which we will read them. We won't read everything on this list, and we will probably read things not on this list, but this will give you an idea of the nature of the course.
Readings: Some readings are from journals and other sources available online, often through the campus library, requiring a library proxy for access from off campus. Others will be scanned and put in the course's bSpace, in the Resources section.
This course brings together several approaches to visual media, with two goals: first, to use the resources of a variety of fields to understand (and perhaps anticipate) changes in the production and uses of personal photographic images (loosely defined); second, to examine the possibilities of multi-disciplinary approaches to new media and new technology. Our organizing topic will be personal photography, but that will be the springboard for discussions about new media and developing information technologies and ways of understanding them.
The disciplines that we will be exploring include: new media studies, visual studies, visual sociology, human-computer interaction, and science and technology studies. We’ll look to the first three of these to help us understand the uses of images, the role of images in society and in human activity. We’ll use the last two (along with the field of new media, again) to see how our understanding of images and visual media can help us understand innovations in the creation and use of images, design innovative technologies, and perhaps anticipate future directions.
This course should be appeal to students in any of the areas described above. The goal is to attract a multidisciplinary group of participants so that the interplay within the group reflects the interplay among the readings.
The course will be highly participatory, with students from the various areas represented taking a lead role in the readings and discussion in their domain, but with everyone expected to learn about all the areas examined.
Active participation in class: readings and discussion
Leading at least one class session; exact logistics will depend on the make-up of the class
A major paper (or maybe something in another mode)
Other experiential exercises or assignments related to images
Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Picador USA; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; "In Plato's Cave;" "Melancholy Objects." PDFs are in bSpace.
Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill & Wang. Excerpt.
Benjamin, W. (1985). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W.Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations; New York: Schocken Books.
Recommended: Benjamin, W. (1931). A short history of photography.
Benjamin, W. (1931). A short
history of photography. Online
-- looks like it was scanned and OCRd, with mistakes.
Benjamin, W. (1985). The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W.Benjamin (Ed.),
Illuminations; New York: Schocken Books.
Bourdieu, P. and Bourdieu, M. C. The peasant and photography. Ethnography 5, 4 (2004) 601-616.
Sontag, S. (1977). On
Photography. New York: Picador USA; Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wells, Liz, ed. (2003) The photography reader. London: Routledge.
Excerpts.
Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill & Wang. Excepts.
Lister, M. Introductory essay. In Lister M. (ed.). The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Routledge, London, 1995.
Slater, D. (1995). Domestic photography and digital culture. In M.Lister (Ed.), The photographic image in digital culture (pp. 129-146). London: Routledge.
Holland, P. (1991). Introduction: history, memory, and the family album. In J.Spence & P. Holland (Eds.), Family snaps: the meaning of domestic photography (pp. 1-14). London: Virago.
Lister, M. A Sack in the Sand: Photography in the Age of Information. Convergence 13, 3 (2007) 251-274.
Rose, G. Family photography and domestic spacings: a case study. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2003) 5-18.
Rose, G. 'Everyone's cuddled up and it just looks really nice': the emotional
geography of some mums and their family photos',. Social and Cultural Geography
5 (4):549-564, 2004.
Haldrup, M. & Larsen, J. (2003). The family gaze. Tourist Studies, 3, 23-45.
Larsen, J. Families Seen Sightseeing: Performativity of Tourist Photography. Space and Culture, 8, 4 (2005), 416-434.
Edwards, E. (2002). Material
beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs. Visual Studies, 17, 67-75.
E. Edwards, and J. Hart, eds (2004). Photographs Objects Histories. Routledge.
Excerpts.
Pels, D., Hetherington, K., & Vandenberghe, F. (2002). The Status of the
Object: Performances, Mediations, and Techniques. Theory, Culture Society,
19, 1-21.
READ FIRST: Wagner, J. (2002). Contrasting images, complementary trajectories: sociology, visual sociology and visual research. Visual Studies, 17, 160-171.
Banks, Marcus. Visual Anthropology: Image, Object, and Interpretation. In Prosser, J. (1998). Image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London; Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.
Becker, H. S. (1994). Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context. Visual Sociology, 10, 5-14. Reprinted in Prosser.
MacDougall, David. The visual in anthropology. In Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Yale University Press, 1997.
Ruby, J. (2005). The last 20 years of visual anthropology - a critical review. Visual Studies, 20, 159-170.
Rose, G. Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials, 2nd ed. SAGE Publications: London, 2007.
(2003). Introduction. In C.Jewitt & G. Kress (Eds.), Multimodal literacy
(pp. 1-18). New York: Peter Lang.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. (Excerpts)
Manovich: These two pieces overlap but both are worth reading -- they should be read together:
Manovich, L. (2003). New Media from Borges to HTML. In N.Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The New Media Reader (pp. 13-25). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Ch 1: What is new media?
Murray, Janet. (2003). Inventing the Medium. In N.Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The New Media Reader (pp. 3-11). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., & Kelly, K. (2003). New media: a critical introduction. London: Routledge. Introduction p 1-4; ch 1, p.p. 9-92.
READ FIRST: Wagner, J. (2002). Contrasting images, complementary trajectories: sociology, visual sociology and visual research. Visual Studies, 17, 160-171.
Banks, Marcus. Visual Anthropology: Image, Object, and Interpretation. In Prosser, J. (1998). Image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London; Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.
Becker, H. S. (1994). Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context. Visual Sociology, 10, 5-14. Reprinted in Prosser.
MacDougall, David. The visual in anthropology. In Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Yale University Press, 1997.
Ruby, J. (2005). The last 20 years of visual anthropology - a critical review. Visual Studies, 20, 159-170.
Elkins, J. (2002). Preface to the book: A Skeptical Introduction to Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1, 93-99. (Note: he wrote this before he wrote this book, and this is not the preface to the book he actually wrote.)
Mirzoeff, N. (1998). What is visual culture? In Mirzoeff, N., ed. (1998). The visual culture reader. London: Routledge (pp. 3-13).
Poster, M. (2002). Visual
studies as media studies. Journal of Visual Culture, 1, 67-70.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). What Do Pictures Want? Univ. of Chicago
Press. Preface, ch. 1, especially pp.5-11 but skim the rest, and ch 2. [Chapter
2 is a reprint of What
Do Pictures Really Want, with a coda added.]
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1, 165-181. (Is also ch 16 of What do pictures want?)
Sturken, M. & Cartwright, L. (2001). Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press: Introduction, Ch. 1 & 2. (Will not use again!)
Jewitt, Carey, and Oyama, Rumiko. Visual meaning: a social semiotic approach. In van Leeuwen, T. & Jewitt, C. (2001). Handbook of visual analysis. London: SAGE. ch 7: pp. 134-156.
More on this topic: Kress, G. R. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading
images: the grammar of visual design. (2nd ed ed.) New York: Routledge.
Note that there is a journal, Social
Semiotics, available online via campus library.
Counts, S. and Fellheimer,
E. Supporting social presence through lightweight photo sharing on and off the
desktop, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems, ACM Press (2004), 599-606.
Crabtree, A., Rodden, T., and Mariani, J. Collaborating around collections:
informing the continued development of photoware, in CSCW '04: Proceedings of
the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM (2004),
396-405.
Frohlich, D., Kuchinsky, A., Pering, C., Don, A., & Ariss, S. (2002). Requirements
for photoware. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported
cooperative work (pp. 166-175). New York: ACM Press.
Graham, A., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A., and Winograd, T. Time as essence
for photo browsing through personal digital libraries, in Proceedings of the
Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, ACM Press (2002),
326-335.
Kindberg, T., Spasojevic, M., Fleck, R., & Sellen, A. (2005). The ubiquitous
camera: an in-depth study of camera phone use. Pervasive Computing, 4.
Rodden, K. and Wood, K. R. How do people manage their digital photographs?,
in CHI 2003: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
ACM Press (2003), 409-416.
Van House, N. A., Davis, M., Ames, M., Finn, M., and Viswanathan, V. The Uses
of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos
and Sharing, in CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
ACM Press (2005), 1853-1856.
Voida, A. and Mynatt, E. D. Six themes of the communicative appropriation of
photographic images, in CHI '05: Proceeding of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press (2005), 171-189.
Papademas, D. (2004). Editor's
introduction: ethics in visual research. Visual Studies, 19, 122-126.
Wang, C. C. & Redwood-Jones, Y. A. (2001). Photovoice Ethics: Perspectives
From Flint Photovoice. Health Education & Behavior, 28, 560-572.
Gross, Larry, John Stuart Katz, and KayRuby, eds. (2003) Image ethics in
the digital age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. excerpts
Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. London: SAGE.
Becker, H. S. (2004). Afterward: photography as evidence, photographs as exposition. In C.Knowles & P. Sweetman (Eds.), Picturing the Social Landscape (pp. 193-197). London: Routledge.
Cronin, O. Psychology and photographic theory. In Prosser J. (ed.). Image-Based Research : a Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. Falmer Press, London ; Bristol, PA, 1998.
Dicks, B., Soyinka, B., & Coffey, A. (2006). Multimodal ethnography. Qualitative Research, 6, 77-96.
Emmison, M. & Smith, P. (2000). Researching the visual: images, objects, contexts and interactions in social and cultural inquiry. London: Sage.
Grady, J. (2004). Working with visible evidence: an invitation & some practical advice. In Harper, D. (1998). An argument for visual sociology. In J.Prosser (Ed.), Image-based research : a sourcebook for qualitative researchers (pp. 24-41). London ;Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.
C.Knowles & P. Sweetman (Eds.), Picturing the Social Landscape (pp. 18-31). London: Routledge.
Latham, A. (2004). Researching and writing everyday accounts of the city: an introduction to the diary-photo diary-interview method. In C.Knowles & P. Sweetman (Eds.), Picturing the Social Landscape (pp. 117-131). London: Routledge.
Pink, S. Doing visual ethnography: images, media, and representation in research. Sage: London, 2006. Excerpts.
Prosser, J. (1998). Image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London; Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.
Ruby, J. (2005). The last 20 years of visual anthropology - a critical review. Visual Studies, 20, 159-170.
Slater, D. Domestic photography and digital culture. In Lister M. (ed.). The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Routledge, London, 1995.
Wagner, J. (2002). Contrasting images, complementary trajectories: sociology, visual sociology and visual research. Visual Studies, 17, 160-171.
Wagner, J. (2004). Constructing Credible Images: Documentary Studies, Social Research, and Visual Studies. American Behavioral Scientist, 47, 1477-1506.
Wang, C. C. & Redwood-Jones, Y. A. (2001). Photovoice Ethics: Perspectives From Flint Photovoice. Health Education & Behavior, 28, 560-572.
Barnhurst, K. G., Vari, M., & Rodriguez, I. (2004). Mapping Visual Studies in Communication. Journal of Communication, 54, 616-644.
Becker, H. S. (1994). Visual
Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a
Matter of Context. Visual Sociology, 10, 5-14.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. (Reissue Edition
ed.) Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press.
Chalfen, R. Interpreting family photography as pictorial communication. In Prosser J. (ed.). Image-Based Research: a Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. Falmer Press, London ; Bristol, PA, 1998.
Chalfen, R. Redundant Imagery:
Some Observations on the Use of Snapshots in American Culture. Journal of
American Culture, 4, 1 (1981), 106-113.
Chalfen, R. Snapshots "r" us: the evidentiary problematic of home
media. Visual Studies, 17, 2 (2004), 141-149.
Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Emmison, M. & Smith, P. (2000). Researching the visual: images, objects, contexts and interactions in social and cultural inquiry. London: Sage.
Lister, M. Introductory
essay. In Lister M. (ed.). The Photographic Image in Digital Culture.
Routledge, London, 1995.
Rose, G. (2004). 'Everyone's cuddled up and it just looks really nice': the
emotional geography of some mums and their family photos, Social and Cultural
Geography, 5, 549-564.
Rose, G. (2003). Family photography and domestic spacings: a case study. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, 5-18.
Ruby, J. (2005). The last
20 years of visual anthropology - a critical review. Visual Studies,
20, 159-170.
Sharples, M. et al Children as photographers: an analysis of children's photographic
behavior and intentions at three age levels. Visual Communication,
2, 3 (2003), 303-330.
Slater, D. (1995).
Domestic photography and digital culture. In M.Lister (Ed.), The photographic
image in digital culture (pp. 129-146). London: Routledge