Time-Lapse Methodologies for Visualizing Change

• In Event: 15.018 - New Directions in Visual Research

Abstract

Purpose / Framing:
We respond to the call to “reimagine education research” by exploring the epistemological and methodological affordances of timelapse video, which offers new possibilities for co-constructing multimodal narratives in educational research. We focus on two particular affordances of timelapse for critical reframing that emerged in our longitudinal study of a school-based makerspace led by youth.

Affordances for participants: When activity is distributed over time, timelapse video offers opportunities for participants to reflect on “elusive knowledges” (Toraldo, Islam, & Mangia, 2016), such as temporal dimensions of change and their own roles in activities (Dant, 2004). As an elicitation tool, timelapse video creates critical distance from the activity that allows new insights to occur by provoking memory and orienting participants to visual representations of change.
Affordances for researchers: When working with significant amounts of data generated over long time periods, educational researchers have primarily relied on quantitative, aggregate data or summative assessments to condense long-term learning into efficient data sets. By compressing video data, timelapse has the potential to create such conditions for qualitative, multimodal data, offering researchers tools for visualizing change over time.

Research Questions:
1. How can timelapse audiovisual recordings enhance researchers’ and participants’ understandings of long-term educational projects?
2. What can students and researchers learn by visually compressing distance between the conceptualization and realization of change?

Research Context:
Data were collected over one year in a youth-organized literacy makerspace located within an urban public high school. The current study focuses on two activity sequences, one in which students painted a mural and the second as students created a literary arts magazine. Following Persohn (2015)’s model, we captured footage of each activity over the course of several weeks and then increased the frames-per-second rate to dramatically shorten the footage. We then watched each timelapse video with project participants, in the tradition of photo-elicitation (Collier, 1967; Harper, 1986). We transcribed data from the collaborative discussions and from follow-up interviews.

Findings / Significance:
In this paper, we focus on four insights related to the affordances outlined above. (1) Timelapse elicited participants’ feelings of pride toward past accomplishments and oriented them toward future action; (2) Collaborative viewing of timelapse helped youth critically reframe their roles in the activities; (3) The audiovisual limitations of the method included a constrained visual frame and a lack of accompanying audio data, which forced a focus on visual aspects of activity, particularly around dynamic movement and emergence; (4) The method as we enacted it was researcher-driven, imposing our (literal) views as researchers and limiting opportunities to be more inclusive and participatory.

We see considerable promise in this method for democratizing the research process, orienting researchers and participants toward visual interpretations that highlight collaborative practice and different ways of knowing. Such a method contributes to efforts to conceptualize and represent change over time and emergence within embodied activity. The method outlined here also creates opportunities for critical reframing, which can support youth in recognizing their potential as change agents and challenge researchers to be aware of the power dynamics at play.

Authors

• Bethany Monea, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily Plummer, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania