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Going Forward Through the World: Thinking Theoretically About First Person Perspective Digital Ethnography

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Abstract

Engaging first person perspective recording as a type of digital ethnography invites the question of how we might understand the status of the knowledge it produces. To examine this question I will focus on how first person perspective camera recordings might be engaged and made analytically meaningful in disciplines where naturalistic and observational visual recording is uncommon and where the idea of producing naturalistic or optimally objective visual recordings of people’s lives is problematized. In doing so I explore the wider possibilities of these technologies for ethnographic research both beyond their existing uses and for interdisciplinary research where the images they produce might be analysed from more than one perspective.

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Acknowledgments

In this article I refer to and specifically cite existing work that has been published with Kerstin Leder Mackley as part of the interdisciplinary LEEDR (Lower Effort Energy Demand Reduction) project, based at Loughborough University. LEEDR is jointly funded by the UK Research Councils’ Digital Economy and Energy programmes (grant number EP/I000267/1). For further information about the project, collaborating research groups and industrial partners, please visit www.leedr-project.co.uk. I would like to thank all the households who have generously participated in this project. The ideas discussed in this article are my own. The article was made possible through a project supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/JO21350/1].

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  1. School of Media and Communication/Design Research Institute, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Sarah Pink

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  1. Sarah Pink
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Correspondence to Sarah Pink.

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Pink, S. Going Forward Through the World: Thinking Theoretically About First Person Perspective Digital Ethnography. Integr. psych. behav. 49, 239–252 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9292-0

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