Enhanced eBooks and multimodal publishing: spitting games and making claims with multimodal data

The ubiquity of digital technologies has led to an increase in the use of video-based research, the development of multimodal methodologies and the analysis of this material across a range of perspectives. The possibilities that multimodal research approaches exploring the interplay of image, talk and movement create, however, are reliant upon a less-than-multimodal way of publishing such work. This article considers how ‘enhanced eBooks’, which can incorporate text, audio and audiovisual material as one complete document, may allow for the inclusion of multimodal data to enrich qualitative research, providing a model for how this can be accomplished. To do this, multimodal materials from a study in which vulnerable adolescents revisited places of personal importance and recorded the narratives such visits elicited via camcorder are examined. The transcript, audiovisual clips and analysis presented provide an insight into the possibilities that multimodal publications herald, with discussions reflecting the challenges and possibilities it generates.

Keywords

digital technologies, discourse analysis, enhanced eBooks, multimodal methods, participatory video, qualitative methods, qualitative research, transcription, visual ethics, young people