Visualising ourselves through artifacts and experience

This essay explores the role of art and design in the development of ethnography as instrument for visualization. A two-stage collaborative autoethnography method in which personal histories in the form of reconstructions of life created by young researchers from an artifact-oriented perspective, are used as point of origin to launch a process of inquiry. The process includes the subsequent use of interviews by a second researcher as a way to gather additional information and further refine the narrative created by the informant author, with the intent to use the data collected in the creation of personal timeline visualizations. The objectives are: To describe how the personal narratives created in the first stage of the method and involving the use of single or multiple events and artifacts can help to illustrate diverse cultural zones of transverse by people throughout the course of a lifetime; to demonstrate how media representations are used in the translation and recording of intangible and ephemeral multimodal experiences of lived memories.

Examples from a workshop developed and taught by the author in diverse cultural settings are provided. Self-reflection is included as participants are asked to create narratives based on significant events of their life and anchored in personal recollections involving material culture, instances, and landscapes. During the second stage a dialogical process interrogates basic notions such as, What is a primary source? and Who is an expert? emerges.

http://cumulus.hkdihongkong2016.org/uploads/files/cumulus_hong_kong_2016_working_papers.pdf