Multimedia Case Studies

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Multimedia case studies can follow the conceptual design and style of the research or teaching case study and can achieve the same educational goals as these. As described by William Naumes and Margaret Naumes, a research case study differs from a teaching case. While the first includes the analysis, theoretical framework, and information in the essay, the second locates the theoretical framework and part of the analysis in the Instructor's Manual that accompanies the case study.

MCS can incorporate elements from traditional (nonmultimedia) case studies such as graphs, texts, diagrams, financial statements, annual reports, business or social history, and interview transcripts. But they also need to integrate these elements with audiovisual ones such as videos detailing the operations and technology of enterprises, social organization, or life stories; videos of interviews; photographs; audios; animations; and/or diverse narrative forms. The product obtained through filming might be closer to products of visual ethnography, viewer created content, and video art, for the importance lies in recording the experiences and not in generating a film-industry-like object.

These studies employ and deploy digital technologies to carry out research combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The results of multimedia case studies are usually expressed in a [Page 578]hypermedia format that integrates hypertext with audiovisual elements. Elements are constituted as nodes that are then linked in the design of the MCS's structure and information architecture. It is the design of this structure and information architecture that is vital in stimulating nonlinear thinking. For publication, the hypermedia MCS can be burned in a CD-ROM/DVD medium or uploaded to the World Wide Web, either within a Web site or as an HTML/PDF document.

At the end of the 20th century, there were few multimedia case studies on the market, few bibliographic references to the topic, and no theoretical framework in which to locate the development of these cases. The demand for MCS was still immature; the costs for developing such cases were high in terms of time and financial resources needed; and an analysis of the literature on teaching and information technologies that would contribute a theoretical framework in which to locate MCS had not been developed.

Pioneering efforts in the creation of the “multimedia” are linked historically to the HyperCard software developed by Apple in the late 1980s, although the origin of the term multimedia is linked to artistic performances that combined different mediums utilizing a projected image, music, and visual images as early as the 1960s.

MCS have emerged with force in the past decade, fueled by the availability/accessibility of digital and information technologies and by the advances of multimedia qualitative research. Data analysis has been transformed, and the traditional parameters of field studies, the methods for obtaining and registering “data” and “information” have been redefined partly by the analysis of visual “data” the ways of analyzing multimodal communication; and the ways in which findings are presented and represented.

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