Month: June 2013

This is a little project page for a couple of questions I’ve put out there:

(a) Why do you take photos? 
(b) What do you do with photos you've taken?

I’m asking this because I want to explore the different purposes we have in mind when we take photos, and the discrepancy between those initial purposes and what we end up doing with the photos later on. This should help me to refine some “purpose” categories I’ve been working on for my research and perhaps, eventually, explain why some of us seem to take so many photos and do so little with them while others manage to engage meaningfully with every photo they take.

Continue reading “#blendedmem: Why we take photos and what we do with them”

I am currently working through the interviews of my first study, using Nvivo 10 to help me code the transcripts. These interviews explored how people at a wedding engaged with photography during and after the event. I will use this case to develop a framework for exploring personal photography practices that includes the purposes for which people engage in these practices and the technological and cultural drivers that influence them.

I have plenty of reservations about Nvivo, in particular the way that it seems to coerce me into treating the data in particular ways that I might not otherwise have wanted to do. An example is its quantification of everything – it’s easy to get sucked into comparing the number of instances of different codes and then attaching an inappropriate value to this comparison. I am keeping thorough notes on these observations as well as any other methodological issues that come up. Continue reading “Progress snapshot: Framework analysis”