Multimedia in Qualitative Research

The History of Multimedia in Qualitative Research

In a certain sense, multimedia has been a part of qualitative research since its beginnings. When 19th-century anthropologists attempted to salvage cultures they believed were doomed for extinction due to the spread of modernity, industrialization, and commercial culture, they documented these cultures through photography, early methods of audiorecording, and film.

Among the best known of early salvage ethnographers was Edward Sheriff Curtis, a North American who photographed the Native American Indians in the late 1880s. In 1900, commissioned by J. P. Morgan to produce a series of volumes on Native Americans, Curtis took over 40,000 images and made over 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native American language, songs, and rituals. Although these documents are a product of 19th-century romanticism that reflect many racist assumptions concerning Native American culture, they remain an important collection of one of the few glimpses into earlier Native American life available for contemporary Native Americans, and constitute perhaps the earliest example of multimedia use in qualitative research. Robert Flaherty's film Nanook of the North (1922), on the lives of Arctic people in a hostile environment, is another key example of these early days of media use in qualitative research. Flaherty, convinced that he was documenting a fading culture, famously edited out all evidence of modern adaptation on the part of the natives he was filming. In the work of Curtis, Flaherty, and many others, media were viewed as unproblematic methods for relaying a realistic portrayal of the cultures under examination. This view of media and the knowledge constructed through qualitative research more generally would not be challenged for several decades.

Film and methods of audiorecording were expensive and cumbersome in the early years of the 20th century. Thus, sociologists as well as anthropologists of this era experimented with the more affordable and more portable medium of photography. One example is Lewis Hine, who had studied sociology under qualitative researchers W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki at the University of Chicago. Drawing upon the urban focus of the Chicago school, Hine became known as a chronicler of the urban conditions of New York City. He photographed thousands of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the United States between 1904 and 1909 and served as photographer for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1920s and 1930s. Hine's work set the standard for urban sociologists and photojournalists who wished to employ visual methods to produce a sympathetic vision of society's disadvantaged.

Although audiorecording was introduced in the United States after U.S. soldiers brought back its techniques from Germany, initial machines were too cumbersome to use in fieldwork settings. The introduction of the audiocassette recorder in the early 1970s forever changed the method of the audio interview in qualitative research. One of the important appeals of the audiocassette recorder was that it bore the promise of an enhanced rigor within qualitative research methods. With cassette recordings, researchers could move from selective, summarized notes to verbatim transcripts and could produce and analyze data using increasingly sophisticated technologies.

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