Paul McIlvenny

Qualitative research that focuses on social interaction and talk has been increasingly based, for good reason, on collections of audiovisual recordings in which 2D flat-screen video and mono/stereo audio are the dominant recording media. This article argues that the future of ‘video’ in video-based qualitative studies will move away from ‘dumb’ flat pixels in a 2D screen. Instead, volumetric performance capture and immersive performative replay rely on a procedural camera/spectator-independent representation of a dynamic real or virtual volumetric space over time. It affords analytical practices of re-enactment – shadowing or redoing modes of seeing/listening as an active spectation for ‘another next first time’ – which play on the tense relationships between live performance, observability, spectatorship and documentation. Three examples illustrate how naturally occurring social interaction and settings can be captured volumetrically and re-enacted immersively in virtual reality (VR) and what this means for data integrity, evidential adequacy and qualitative analysis.

This chapter examines how a child learns to sense and move through a transient environment while engaging in recreational cross-country skiing. A mobile video ethnography was undertaken of a parent instructing a novice child on how to ski. Using interactional analysis, the paper examines how snow is sensed, felt and made salient in spatio-interactional practices, and how the snowscape is (re)territorialised by the participants making temporary tracks in the snow. In this way, tracks can shape future mobile actions and immanent pedagogical activities within the practices of cross-country skiing, which inculcate the child’s feeling for an ephemeral geography of snow.

This paper applies some of the major concepts and methods that Ron Scollon developed in order to analyse how discourses of environmental citizenship, sustainability and climate change are mediated in a global media event. ‘Earth Hour’ began in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, and in 2009 it was proclaimed a successful global event. The event focused primarily on citizen awareness, participation and solidarity in mitigating climate change. In its sister campaign (‘Vote Earth’), the discourse of representative democracy was deployed to constitute an imaginary global electorate. The paper focuses on the analysis of: (a) the intense drive to visualize and spectacularize (mediational means) the simple act of switching off the lights and the consequences of such an act; (b) the massive infrastructure of discourse to synchronize the collective performance of a global ‘climate public’; (c) the discursive ‘memory work’ to archive and memorialize the hour, e.g. on YouTube; (d) the attempt to inculcate a ‘global citizen’ who is concerned with the environment/climate and whose anticipatory mediated actions in relation to it are prefigured by the event; and (e) the resistance to the circulation of this new mediated discourse.

Consumer versions of the passive 360° and stereoscopic omni-directional camera have recently come to market, generating new possibilities for qualitative video data collection. This paper discusses some of the methodological issues raised by collecting, manipulating and analysing complex video data recorded with 360° cameras and ambisonic microphones. It also reports on the development of a simple, yet powerful prototype to support focused engagement with such 360° recordings of a scene. The paper proposes that we ‘inhabit’ video through a tangible interface in virtual reality (VR) in order to explore complex spatial video and audio recordings of a single scene in which social interaction took place. The prototype is a software package called AVA360VR (‘Annotate, Visualise, Analyse 360° video in VR’). The paper is illustrated through a number of video clips, including a composite video of raw and semi-processed multi-cam recordings, a 360° video with spatial audio, a video comprising a sequence of static 360° screenshots of the AVA360VR interface, and a video comprising several screen capture clips of actual use of the tool. The paper discusses the prototype’s development and its analytical possibilities when inhabiting spatial video and audio footage as a complementary mode of re-presenting, engaging with, sharing and collaborating on interactional video data.

Elizabeth Jochum, Louis-Philippe Demers, Bill Vorn, Evgenios Vlachos, Paul McIlvenny & Pirkko Raudaskoski

A notable feature of the participatory communication repertoire developed by the Occupy movement is known as the “Human Microphone” or “People’s Mic”, reminiscent of the call-and-response format of action. A collection was made of more than 160 online amateur videos recorded at an Occupy protest site or event in which the Human Mic and the disaffiliative “mic check” were used in diverse ways. In 19 separate cases, more than one video recording was independently uploaded of the same event, thus giving a unique insight into the constitution of participation in a collective (and yet potentially dissensual) politico-interactional space from disparate technology-mediated spatial positions at the site. Ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) is used to analyse the social interactional accomplishment and collective organisation of the ‘voice’ of the Human Mic, including its propagation to larger audiences and its interdiscursive translation into new settings as a strategic tool of political communication that attempts to ‘occupy’ institutional speech.