Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung/ Journal for Discourse Studies

Including Visual Discourse Materials in Situational Analysis Research

Zusammenfassung

This article introduces the use of Situational Analysis methods with extant »visual discourse« materials found in a particular situation of inquiry. It describes the pressing need to include such analyses in social science research as imagery increasingly pervades and becomes constitutive of daily life. The initial steps are: deciding, locating, collecting, and tracking the extant visual discourse materials. Next, the analyst enters, examines, and begins memoing those materials, including both one’s own impressions and writing specific kinds of guided memos. Next is making the four kinds of maps involved in doing SA research: »situational«, »relational«, »social worlds/arenas« and »positional maps« of these visual discourse materials. The final step is highlighting the most interesting and previously unstudied features of those materials in the research report.