Working Images: methods and media in ethnographic research

Introduction to the site

Working Images, an edited volume based on the conference of the same name, explores visual methods and media in anthropological research. The printed word plays and important part in anthropology - it has been used to communicate the empirical and theoretical findings, ideas, debates and arguments of the discipline for many years. This was one of the reasons why Working Images is a book and not a CD ROM, DVD or simply a web site. However a second reason why Working Images, a book that demonstrates what we might learn and create when we use visual methods and media in anthropology, exists at all is that there are some aspects of experience and knowledge that cannot be represented in words. This web site, designed to accompany the book attempts to fill some of those gaps are are inevitable when one writes about visual images. Video clips and web pages cannot be reproduced in a printed text in anything but a static form that cannot satisfactorily express their respective linear or multilinear narratives. Here I include extracts from video and hypermedia projects discussed in the contributors' chapters. Publishing colour images is expensive and the number that can be funded for one book is limited. Here I have included art and photographic exhibitions the book could not house. Moreover in our contemporary world, many academics and students are networked and knowledge, case studies, or biographies that are cited in written texts are increasing cited as existing not in printed texts but on websites. This site makes some of these links to take readers to the pages and representations that are part of the context in which the chapters of Working Images belong. Some authors have developed their own sites that are linked to this one, others I have compiled for this site.

At the same time, just as the words in the Working Images volume need images, the images and links in this web site also need the printed words contained in the book. For those interested in our book this web site offers a taster. It includes the chapter abstracts, images and links that go with each chapter. These however are incomplete without the written ideas and knowledge that comprise the book they accompany. 

Sarah Pink, s.pink@lboro.ac.uk December 2003

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