Using Video Diaries in Social Science Research

The focus of this chapter is the use of video-diaries in social research. The aim is to examine and reflect upon the particular ethical terrain and situated ethics of using visual diary method in social science research with different participant groups who arguably present specific ethical concerns, including children and older people, people with disabilities (either physical, cognitive, or psychiatric), and older people. The authors present a discussion of the specific ethical considerations arising from the use of this method due to the particular type of data it generates, namely audio and moving visual data. As such, the process of creating a video diary and the procedures involved in collecting and analysing video diary data are fundamentally different from a paper-based (non-digital) diary. For these reasons, it is important to step back and reflect on the situated ethics, including the digital ethics encountered when using this method.

Archive Photography That Forms a Personal and Collective Memory

Personal and family albums created by Latvians in the period from 1939 until the 1950s are placed in a wider social and historical perspective by analyzing its content, as well as the individual intent to create it. This work explores photography album as a tool to organize memories and how historical, personal photography albums serve and interact as evidence of private as well as a public past. The research tries to prove the historical authenticity in two personal albums created by Latvians during the Second World War and the following years – a visual diary illustrating the imprisonment in the Soviet working camp in Siberia and a family album memorializing the way and life of the Latvian refugees in the Alt Garge camp, Germany. Two personal albums (currently stored at the archive of the Museum of Occupation of Latvia) have become objects of historical value and are an informative source for learning, analyzing and educating about historical events.

A Survey for Long-Term Multi-Person Tracking for Surveillance Video

Multi-person tracking plays a critical role in the analysis of surveillance video. However, most existing work focus on shorterterm (e.g. minute-long or hour-long) video sequences. Therefore, we propose a multi-person tracking algorithm for very long-term (e.g. month-long) multi-camera surveillance scenarios. Long-term tracking is challenging because 1) the apparel/appearance of the same person will vary greatly over multiple days and 2) a person will leave and re-enter the scene numerous times. To tackle these challenges, we leverage face recognition information, which is robust to apparel change, to automatically reinitialize our tracker over multiple days of recordings. Unfortunately, recognized faces are unavailable oftentimes. Therefore, our tracker propagates identity information to frames without recognized faces by uncovering the appearance and spatial manifold formed by person detections. We tested our algorithm on a 23-day 15-camera data set (4,935 hours total), and we were able to localize a person 53.2% of the time with 69.8% precision. Wefurther performed video summarization experiments based on our tracking output. Results on 116.25 hours of video showed that wewere able to generate a reasonable visual diary (i.e. a summary of what a person did) for different people, thus potentially opening thedoor to automatic summarization of the vast amount of surveillance video generated every day

Virtual labyrinths: Nancy K. Miller’s and Susan Gubar’s narratives of cancer

In the midst of the age of memoir, where the demarcation between public discourse and private lives has been eroded, a number of life-writing genres figure prominently as identity narratives. Specifically, illness narratives proliferate in both digital and non-digital forms, thus becoming powerful social and cultural forms to understand illness today. This article aims to analyze how online forms are bringing relevant changes both to the genre and to the actual communication of cancer experience. Nancy K. Miller and Susan Gubar choose different forms (visual diary and blog, respectively) to help readers “acknowledge the place of cancer in the world”. Having lived in cancerland for a while, both reject widespread stereotypes about illness, such as being a cancer survivor, the role of the good patient or the need to reject negative emotions such as anger, fear or sadness. Specifically, I will use the concept of automediality in order to explore how subjectivity is constructed in their use of images and new media. This concept may help us further explore the ways in which online forms offer new ways of self-representation and mediation between technology and subjectivities.

Visual Diary: How Photos Represent the Context of Field Research

The article addresses the possibility of using visual data in field research. The article is based on the visual data obtained in the frame of the author's research projects of 2017—2019, aimed at studying everyday life of industrial workers in Yekaterinburg and the transformation of industrial territories in Moscow. The article is the additional visual material to the authors methodological manual “How to Collect Data in the Field [Qualitative] Research”. The authors have shown both the analytical significance of visual materials and their didactic potential. The article demonstrates how the research practice of photographing is organically integrated into the classical stages of fieldwork — access to the field, data collection, analysis and presentation of the results. At the same time, photographs are the relevant source of data about everyday life of citizens — material culture, spatial practices, emotions, identities. The authors make an attempt to visualize the process of field research, show the process of conducting projects through the photographs and demonstrate the genre of empirical materials as a visual diary.

Chasing the sun: Qu Leilei's serial images in early post-Mao China

'You always treat the sun as though it were yours.' Lining the frame of a pen-and-ink sketch, these words reflect conditions of possibility particular to the contemporaneity of early post-Mao China. Included in his Visual Diary series from the early 1980s, Qu Leilei's image-text turns inward the heavily socialized forms of visual and political expression from the revolutionary era. As instances of the artist's emerging private practice, such works, including etchings, line drawings, and fragments of prose poetry, are seldom addressed in existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese art. This article takes up a selective examination of Qu's diaristic ephemera from this historical moment following the Cultural Revolution (1966‐76) to explore how Qu's entries both maintain and transform aspects of revolutionary-era media and visuality. The article further considers the following questions: In what ways does Qu's Visual Diary reconfigure the serial images of revolutionary state-driven practices in the social landscape of still-Maoist Beijing? How do Qu's transfigured image-texts complicate the rejection of Maoist visual vanguardism in cultural practices after the revolution?