Abstract
This chapter asks how researchers can adequately take account of digital technology’s contribution to collaborative work. I argue that ethnographic studies of digital work can benefit from Trans-Sequential Analysis (TSA), a perspective for empirical social research which concerns the spatiotemporal organization of social processes through the continuous and collaborative work on “formative objects”. I show that particularly TSA’s praxeological concept of materialization is helpful to understand how software, hardware and data contribute to cooperation: it allows to trace how shared objects materialize step by step, how participants work on them in situ, and how they save and share their work with collaborators elsewhere. Arguing that digital work occurs materially, too, and that TSA provides a systematic framework to research how it does so empirically, the chapter offers an in-depth discussion of TSA’s methodological assumptions of materiality as well as its implications for research based on an ethnographic case study. In the empirical analysis, I discuss the step-by-step materialization of digital visual effects for film and television as drafts and the situated use of different materials to evaluate them in screenings, to introduce a concept of digital objects, and to demonstrate both the material variety of digital work and the use and usefulness of TSA in studies of digital work.
Zusammenfassung
Dieses Kapitel geht der Frage nach, wie in Arbeitsforschungen der Beitrag digitaler Technologie angemessen berücksichtigt werden kann. Ich argumentiere, dass ethnografische Studien digitaler Arbeit von der Trans-Sequentiellen Analyse (TSA) profitieren können, einer soziologischen Forschungsperspektive, die sich mit der raumzeitlichen Organisation sozialer Prozesse durch die kontinuierliche und kollaborative Arbeit an „formativen Objekten“ beschäftigt. Ich zeige, dass insbesondere ihr praxeologisches Konzept von Materialisierung hilfreich ist, um zu verstehen, wie Software, Hardware und Daten zur Zusammenarbeit beitragen: Es wird nachgezeichnet, wie sich Arbeitsobjekte Schritt für Schritt materialisieren, wie Teilnehmer:innen an diesen in situ arbeiten und wie sie ihre Arbeit speichern und mit Kolleg:innen an anderen Orten teilen. Auch digitale Arbeit ereignet sich materiell, und wie ich zeige bietet TSA einen systematischen Rahmen, um empirisch zu erforschen, wie das erfolgt. Die Argumentation stützt sich auf eine detaillierte Diskussion methodologischer Annahmen zur Materialität sowie einer ethnographischen Fallanalyse. Anhand der schrittweisen Materialisierung digitaler visueller Effekte für Film und Fernsehen als Entwürfe sowie der Verwendung verschiedener Materialien zu deren situierter Bewertung stelle ich ein Konzept digitaler Objekte vor und zeige sowohl die materielle Vielfalt digitaler Arbeit als auch die Verwendung und Nützlichkeit von TSA in Studien digitaler Arbeit auf.
I would like to thank the editors and the other contributors to this volume for their helpful and knowledgeable remarks on earlier drafts of this chapter. I also thank Courtney Brittan for proofreading.
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Notes
- 1.
For the study, I visited seven VFX companies in Germany and in the UK between 2013 and 2017, three of them multiple times. Each visit lasted for between a day and up to two weeks (Trischler 2021a). In addition to ethnographic observations and conversations, I conducted twelve interviews with project supervisors and producers and I carried out five group discussions with visual effects artists on their work, who either worked for the companies I visited or for other firms.
- 2.
I edited the excerpt from my fieldnotes [UK2/08.11.2016] and translated it from German for this publication. Along with the audio transcript [UK2/2016/E5: 1m50-2m28s] this data is already published in a German paper (Trischler 2021b). In the data, employees’ names are substituted for their professional positions, which are presented as superscripted abbreviations differentiated by numbers in the order of their appearance (e.g., the first visual effects artist relevant to the transcript being A1). In the transcripts, empty single brackets indicate incomprehensible utterances (), filled single brackets refer to the assumed wording (I). Contextual references are presented in braces {}. Words uttered more loudly in relation are capitalized, degree signs ° indicate those uttered more quietly. Doubled square brackets point out overlaps [[alright]], single digits in brackets indicate the pause length in seconds (1), full stops in brackets refer to micro-pauses under a second (.).
- 3.
Emic terms are indicated with doubled quotation marks when first used.
- 4.
This implies that materiality does not precede social practice methodologically. While physically a file might be imported from a previous situation, preceding the practice it is currently used in, it obtains its current social relevance exactly as part of the practice it was a part of prior to its “second” occurrence, and not just the durability of its physical form. Particularly in repair and maintenance studies it has been stressed lately what has to be done constantly to make things durable (Jackson 2014; Graham and Thrift 2007).
- 5.
And thus it is oriented toward the solving and/or processing of a particular problem. TSA is currently redefined as a problem-centered approach (Scheffer forthcoming).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Thus, methodologically, this perspective also includes the materiality of research itself. Research practices as well as results are not independent of materializations in the field. TSA concerns the spatiotemporal organization of social processes observable for the members of a field, and—with luck and dedication—also for the researchers involved in this field. Realms of social reality are only available as objects for research materially: through transcribed or recorded verbal accounts, documents, digital data files, and so on. This refers to the observability of social reality as sociomaterial practice (forming part of the intelligibility of practice), the sociomaterial involvement of researchers in their fields of research and the materiality of research practices and data. In ethnography, research practices and researched practices might overlap (Neubert and Trischler 2021).
- 9.
This might partly be due to it being developed originally in mostly institutional workplaces such as research fields, defined by massive paper loads and physical order of people, documents, and ideas through filing cabinets, desk arrangements, stands in court rooms, archives or public offices.
- 10.
- 11.
However, digital technology (still) poses challenges for practice-theory. For instance, only recently has its infrastructural character been taken into account (Shove and Trentman 2019); to understand digital technology in practice, it is not sufficient to consider local devices and software-in-use, but rather how they rely on wireless internet, electricity, etc. (Magaudda and Piccioni 2019). While TSA’s newer rendition offers the concept of apparatus as a more or less stable arrangement concerned with the production of a particular type of formative object (such as cases in a court), questions of (digital) infrastructure remain largely unaddressed.
- 12.
All employees had to sign “non-disclosure agreements” which complemented safe internal company servers on which visual effects were saved, and restrictions concerning who was allowed to enter the company premises. All of these aspects also affected my research on visual effects.
- 13.
- 14.
In some companies the setup of screening rooms was more office-like, with office chairs and a computer on which drafts would be watched. The practice of evaluation (looping, stopping, discussing drafts), however, was comparably organized.
- 15.
The work on digital visual effects is highly specialized: one team member might be working on a “rig”, a technical skeleton for a digital character, to which another might add the muscles, another the surfaces such as skin and fabric or hair, and yet another might integrate the animation into an existing film shot. Outside of the screening room, this group—the project team—almost never gathered in physical proximity. They worked on their tasks individually, sometimes visiting each other at their work stations to discuss design problems, or communicated via company software such as project databases, or e-mail or messenger services.
- 16.
E.g. when exporting implied rendering of 3D animation or simulation by calculating sequences of images frame by frame through a virtual camera in the software, or if importing meant searching for data on data bases and buffering large video files on the local computer.
- 17.
This data excerpt is based on field notes combined with time codes from an audio record of the screening (see also Trischler 2021a, b, 91). Here, only the sequence of the screened files is presented. What exactly could be seen on screen as well as what was said and done in the screening room are left out to highlight the temporal sequencing. Yet, the analysis of the screened content and conversation also supports the sequencing, as the speech related to what could be seen on screen.
- 18.
This was mostly in the internationally standardized frequency of 24 frames per second, which creates the optical illusion of movement. For cinema, it is 24, for TV 25, and today some content is produced in a High Frame Rate (HFR), 48 or more frames per second (FPS).
- 19.
The situated production of distinct visual effects shots also occurred visually, through a full-screen projection, as well as bodily and spatially, through the physical orientation of the participants towards the screen indicated in the previous section (in which the control unit in the back of the room was disregarded, marginalizing the local conditions to play back and change visual effects, see Trischler 2021a, p. 83 ff.). For further discussion of the temporal coordination of digital cooperation see Trischler (forthcoming).
- 20.
In the screening, the drafts were not changed, but rather annotated: supervisors gave artists notes on their work. These notes were then exported through the company database, saving them in relation to, yet independent of, the actual draft.
- 21.
Rüling and Duymejian (2014) argue that shared knowledge about films helps the coordination of specialized digital film production. While it might be true that visual effects producers are film experts, with the example of the film plot, it should become clear that it is actually concrete materials which help coordinate specialized processes.
- 22.
Translation (Fig. 5): (1) peasants -> army from behind, (2) army (*) plate with grey shade (same plate), (5) army from the front, (9) horseman, (note) I ask if this [is] „in chronololog“ [sic, chronological order] -> yeah that’s the sequence
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Trischler, R. (2023). Digital Objects? Materialities in the Trans-Sequential Analysis of Digital Work. In: Kolanoski, M., Löffler, M.S., Küffner, C., Terjung, C. (eds) Trans-Sequentiell Forschen. Politische Ethnographie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40826-8_7
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