Engaging with the Hidden Record: Surfacing the Felt and More-Than-Human in Video Analysis

• In Event: Video Interaction Analysis Lab: Working Processes as Relation Building in Times of Unrest

Abstract

Interaction Analysis has offered researchers powerful tools for observing how people coordinate meaning with each other and with material tools in their environment (Jordan and Henderson, 1995). While IA has historically attended closely to artifacts, objects, and spatial arrangements (Erickson, 2004), these are often framed as artifacts used by humans, rather than as relational beings with affective or agential roles (e.g., Krishnamoorthy et al., 2021). In response, we ask: How do we attend to the more-than-human and felt dimensions of data in video analysis?

Here, we use "more-than-human" in two ways: First, we follow Indigenous scholars who recognize land, water, and the natural world as active participants in learning environments (Bang & Marin, 2015; McDaid Barry et al., 2023). Second, we draw on posthumanist and affect theorists (Ahmed, 2004; Barad, 2007; Bennet, 2010) to consider the material, atmospheric, and affective forces that shape interaction but frequently elude transcription. Together, we believe these perspectives point to a hidden record that is often lost in IA.

Our reorientation thickens the methodological and ethical terrain of IA, raising questions about whose experiences are accounted for in recordings and analysis, and how we might repair what’s lost in the translation from live interaction to video data. In response to these questions, we highlight three practices that our IA lab uses to surface the stickiness of hidden records, and implicate researchers in the analytic process:

1. Re-enactment as embodied analysis: Physically re-creating gestures, spatial arrangements, and rhythms from video enables an embodied understanding of the record (Anonymized, 2024). This practice transforms IA’s repeated viewing into a kind of re-experiencing, where insights that would have otherwise been missed emerge from a bodily engagement with the video record.

2. Incorporating the felt record: With advances in video technology (Davidsen & Steier, 2025), we now collect far more footage than can we can deeply analyze. To preserve the integrity of the felt record, we incorporate fieldnotes written during or after data collection as part of the analytic record. These notes resurface affective experiences– like stillness or silence– not always visible in video alone (Author 2, 2024), positioning the researcher body as an additional record-keeper in data collection.

3. Attending to the more-than-human: We seek to re-presence the natural world in our analysis by recognizing more-than-humans as actants who jointly produce interactional events (e.g. Marin, 2020; Hecht & Jadallah, 2023). We include more-than-human moves in transcripts to disrupt anthropocentric narratives and recognize the more-than-human world as full of interactional partners who direct human discourse and embodied moves. While we are cautious of speaking for the natural world, we see this approach as critical to acknowledging more-than-human personhood toward more equitable socioecological relations (McDaid Barry et al., 2023).

Together, these practices both trouble the idea of video data as a stable, objective record, and offer paths forward toward building multiple epistemologies into our knowledge building processes. We argue that engaging with this multiplicity has the potential to implicate researchers in their analyses and encourage ways of engaging our ontoepistemologies as part of our analysis record.

Authors

• Lana Cosic, Vanderbilt University

• Tessaly Jen, Vanderbilt University