This research tradition has arisen from a specific set of historical, disciplinary and institutional conditions. The very emergence of 'documentation' is predicated upon a set of long-term processes in which humans have developed the capacity to use symbols and store knowledge such that it can be exchanged and inter-generationally transmitted.Consisting of an impressive list of contributors, the four volumes discuss the history, development and current debates alive in the field, such as the biographical turn in social science, the theoretical underpinnings to using human documents in social research and the epistemological, substantive and practical concerns with the process of analyzing data from human documentary sources.Comprehensive, illuminating and dynamic, this collection will have appeal across all social science disciplines, especially sociology, social psychology, criminology, politics and international relations, management and business studies, human geography, media and communication studies Volume One: Human Documents: Perspectives and Approaches Volume Two: Analyzing Human Documents Volume Three: Human Documents in Social Research Volume Four: Archival Research and Data Re-Use
In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a hitherto unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data. The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration. Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.
Historically, social researchers have shown a willingness to exploit new technologies to enhance, facilitate and support their various activities. However, arguably no other technological development has influenced the landscape of social research as rapidly and fundamentally as the Internet. This collection avoids both uncritical embrace and wholesale dismissal by considering some of the key literature in the field of Internet research methods. Volume One: Core Issues, Debates and Controversies in Internet Research introduces themes and issues that run across all four volumes such as: epistemology, ontology and methodology in the online world; access, social divisions and the 'digital divide'; and the ethics of online research. Volume Two: Taking Research Online - Internet Survey and Sampling addresses the range of resources, digital archives and Internet-based data sources that exist online from relatively straightforward and practical guides to such material through to more polemical pieces which consider problems relating to the use, access and analysis of online data and resources. Volume Three: Taking Research Online - Qualitative Approaches considers the broad range of approaches to conducting researching via or 'in' the Internet. The focus is on conventional methods that have been 'taken online', and which in doing so, have become transformed in scope and character. Volume Four: Research 'On' and 'In' the Internet - Investigating the Online World follows logically from that which precedes it in exploring how social research has been 'taken online', not simply through the deployment of existing methods and techniques via the Internet, but in researchers' increasing recognition and investigation of the online world as a sphere of human interaction - a socio-cultural arena to be explored 'from the desktop' as it were.
