Month: February 2019

Topic – Teaching and Researching with the Audio-Visual essay

Our guest this week is Catherine Fowler from the Media, Film and Communication programme. She will consider the promise and challenge of audio-visual essays as a research, publishing, and teaching tool.

Over roughly the past 5 years Film and Media scholarship has been animated by the idea of the Audio-Visual essay. Increasingly the argument is made that media studies has always been held back by the inability to respond to our objects of study in their language; rather, when we write about the audio-visual we are always inevitably translating, and something is lost in translation. With the DVD came the opportunity to undertake videographic analysis: by stopping, slowing and repeating images students and researchers have been able to interrogate stylistic features and analyse how the art and politics of films come about. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital editing tools videographic analysis has entered another level.

The audio-visual essay has been born as both a form of assessment for students and research for scholars. The introduction of audio-visual essays raises questions familiar to all those working with digital tools: how can they be ‘counted’ as research? How can they be used to create new knowledge? And how can we ensure that audio-visual essays improve and support students’ writing tasks and scholarship rather than putting both in peril?

Reading & Viewing

Dead Time – Catherine Fowler, Claire Perkins, and Andrea Rassell

Unseen Screens: Eye Tracking, Magic and Misdirection – Tessa Dwyer and Jenny Robinson

Another piece from [in]Transition which gives some useful background to what research on eye tracking screens typically ‘looks like’.