RESCuE Third Consortium Meeting and WP3 Interpretation Workshop in Madrid
5 – 6 March 2015
The project consortium met in Madrid the 5th and the 6th of March to intensify their knowledge about photo elicitation and picture analysis methodology, in order to prepare the analysis of our visual material. We have been delighted to gain deep insights and advice into the potentials of visual data analysis by our two invited guest speakers: Prof. Dr. Aida Bosch from the University of Erlangen and Prof. Dr. Roswitha Breckner from the University of Vienna. Their lectures encouraged us to start a visual analysis with an intense analysis of the picture itself, firstly without including the overall context given by accompanying interview transcripts or field notes. It is reasonable to start by collecting feelings and associations that first appear when looking at the picture for the first time. Aida Bosch described this as the “punctum” in the tradition of Roland Barthes. Roswitha Beckner emphasized the importance of paying attention to the elements, composition or segments of the pictures. A third crucial moment in the procedure is the iconographic interpretation, where the researcher must attend to the intentions or perspective of the photographer which helps to make questions or conjectures about the image. It is then in a final step, that the researchers have to add their knowledge of context to their initial interpretation, including the punctum, to reach a complete understanding of the image in all of its elements. Following this, we selected two pictures from our fieldwork for applying the suggested analysis of the guest speakers. The first picture was from the Finnish urban case and showed a root fire on the snow with sausages on a grill. Following the procedure, the group first explored the punctum, and then proceeded to make pre-iconographic and iconographic description, iconographic interpretation to end up in iconologic interpretation and a case structure hypothesis. The same procedure was collectively applied to a second picture out of an urban Turkish case, which presented a scene on a textile workshop with men working at sewing machines. Getting a deep insight on the procedure of visual analysis allowed us to work intensively on our rich visual material gained during the last month of our fieldwork. This workshop was a huge support for the further progress of the project.