Where Words Fail: Storying Audio-Visual Data
Audio-visual video as a data generation tool enables researchers to repeatedly view immensely rich, detailed footage of people in their lived worlds, while the visual and aural veracity of the medium adds valuable fine-grained data to narrative and ethnog
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Where Words Fail: Storying Audio-Visual Data Jessica O’Bryan
Abstract Audio-visual video as a data generation tool enables researchers to repeatedly view immensely rich, detailed footage of people in their lived worlds, while the visual and aural veracity of the medium adds valuable fine-grained data to narrative and ethnographic studies. However, there are ethical and methodological challenges in documenting, analysing and storying such data in narrative inquiry approaches. In a collective case study examining the cultural habits of three eminent tertiary classical singing teachers, the teachers videoed several hours of one-to-one lessons with their undergraduate students over the course of a semester. After repeated views of the video footage, several excerpts were transcribed and formed into discrete scenes within larger narratives. Using one such scene as exemplar, participants’ conversation, song, gesture, music and the lived space are described and transcribed, shaped into a storied excerpt, and analysed. This chapter discusses the use of video in the study and considers some of the benefits and hazards of storying video data in narrative inquiry methods. Keywords Classical singing lessons • Tertiary music learning and teaching • Master/apprentice • Narrative inquiry • Audio-visual documentation • Video data • Video • Data generation • Methods
Introduction The use of audio-visual recording devices to record lived worlds has grown rapidly in recent years, with the advent of smart phones, go-pro cameras and other video tools offering myriad ways of documenting events, incidents and interactions. For researchers, video has become a valuable tool to document these lived worlds. However, the use of video in research is not without ethical challenges, and visual documentation is as yet not fully reconciled by the academy as its own medium in
J. O’Bryan (*) Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 R. Dwyer et al. (eds.), Narrative Research in Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1579-3_6
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the dissemination of research, which poses methodological issues for narrative inquirers in the creation of research texts. In this chapter I discuss the processes of audio-visual data generation, transcription and analysis, and the transformation of these into a narrative text. The following introductory section reports on a collective case study investigating the values, beliefs and practices of expert tertiary classical singing teachers and their students.
Studying Classical Singers I am a long-term member of the classical singing community, having both taken classical singing lessons and given them across most of my adult life, and am fascinated by expert classical singing teaching and learning in a tertiary one-to-one lesson setting. I believed a study examining learning and teaching of expert classical singing teachers would inform my own teaching practices and lead to a reflexive positioning of my own learning and teachi
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