Reframing temporality in participatory visual research with timelapse video

Abstract

In this article, the authors offer ‘timelapse’—removing frames from video footage to effectively ‘speed up’ visual activity—as an experimental method for engaging in the practice of seeing the emergence and contingency of activity across different timescales and in collaboration with participants. Building on previous calls to zoom up and out in analysis in order to understand the cumulative impact of moments, events, and episodes across different timescales, this article frames timelapse video as a means of visually representing activity in a way that emphasizes not only its multimodal dimensions but its temporal ones. The authors explicate how the ‘zoomed out’ temporal perspective of timelapse video offers two intertwined analytic affordances in qualitative research: (1) insight into how activity is coordinated across micro-, meso-, and macro-timescales, and (2) insight into how activity is emergent from and contingent upon macrosocial factors. They argue that these analytic affordances of timelapse are particularly well suited to being collaboratively realized alongside participants, illustrating these participatory affordances through data collected from a two-year study about literacy and arts-based practices in a US public high school. This article suggests that the participatory practice of seeing what circulates across different scales of time in timelapse video not only highlights the contingency and partiality inherent in all visual representations, thus unsettling notions of video as depicting ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, but also emphasizes the importance of multiscalar perspective taking for considering how macrosocial dimensions of meaning unfold across longer timescales and in relation to micro-interactional ones.