Abstract
The concept of indexicality has remained fundamental to documentary, helping to distinguish the genre from other audio-visual forms and providing the sense of urgency it generates as a social-political form. This chapter considers the nature and implications of indexicality at a time when video capturing capabilities have become increasingly ubiquitous, and embedded in mobile, locative, and networked devices where image and sound recording operate together with an array of other sensors. The generation of video together with metadata involves the generation of additional layers of information which carry meaning above and beyond that seen within the frame. At one level, metadata help to augment the “sense-making” capability of documentary makers, increasing the means to scale up workflows around the collation, organization, and sifting of material. At another level, it is important to recognize that metadata can take on different meanings within the automated systems which assess, categorize, and perform operations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Anderson, Chris. 2008. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired Magazine 16 (7): 16–07.
Andrejevic, Mark, and Mark Burdon. 2015. “Defining the Sensor Society.” Television & New Media 16 (1): 19–36.
Aston, Judith, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose (eds.). 2017. i-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press.
Berry, David. 2011. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bibart, James E. 2016. “Metadata in Digital Photography: The Need for Protection and Production of This Silent Witness.” Capital University Law Review 44 (4): 789–830.
Boyd, Danah, and Kate Crawford. 2011. “Six Provocations for Big Data.” In A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, vol. 21. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute.
Corner, John. 1996. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Crawford, Kate. 2013. “The Hidden Biases in Big Data.” HBR Blog Network 1. https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data.
Cruz, Edgar Gómez. 2016. “14 Photo-genic Assemblages.” In Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices, edited by Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio, 228–242. New York: Routledge.
Cruz, Edgar Gómez, and Asko Lehmuskallio (eds.). 2016. Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices. New York: Routledge.
DatNav: How to Navigate Digital Data for Human Rights Research (June 2016), The Engine Room, Amnesty International. https://www.theengineroom.org/datnav-digital-data-in-human-rights-research/.
Dovey, Jon. 2014. “Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation.” In New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, edited by Kate Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, 11–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dovey, Jon, and Mandy Rose. 2012. “We’re Happy and We Know It: Documentary, Data, Montage.” Studies in Documentary Film 6 (2): 159–173.
Dovey, Jon, and Mandy Rose. 2013. “‘This Great Mapping of Ourselves’—New Documentary Forms Online.” In BFI Companion to Documentary, edited by Brian Winston, 366–375. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fuller, Matthew. 2003. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. New York: Autonomedia.
Fuller, Matthew (ed.). 2008. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Golder, Scott A., and Michael W. Macy. 2014. “Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 40: 129–152.
Gregory, Sam, and Elizabeth Losh. 2012. “Remixing Human Rights: Rethinking Civic Expression, Representation and Personal Security in Online Video.” First Monday 17 (8). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4104/3279.
Gye, Lisa. 2007. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum. 21 (2): 279–288.
Hand, Martin. 2012. Ubiquitous Photography. Cambridge: Polity.
Hermida, Alfred. 2014. “Filtering Fact from Fiction.” In Ethics for Digital Journalists: Emerging Best Practices, edited by Lawrie Zion and David Craig, 59–73. New York: Routledge.
Hight, Craig. 2008. “The Field of Digital Documentary: A Challenge to Documentary Theorists.” Studies in Documentary Film 2 (1): 3–7.
Hight, Craig. 2014. “Automation Within Digital Videography: From the Ken Burns Effect to ‘Meaning-Making’ Engines.” Studies in Documentary Film 8 (3): 235–250.
Hight, Craig. 2017a. “The Challenges of Using YouTube as a Data Resource.” In Studying Digital Media Audiences: Perspectives from Australasia, edited by Craig Hight and Ramaswami Harindranath, 98–115. Oxford: Routledge.
Hight, Craig. 2017b. “Software as Co-creator in Interactive Documentary.” In i-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, 82–96. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hjorth, Larissa, and Sarah Pink. 2014. “New Visualities and the Digital Wayfarer: Reconceptualizing Camera Phone Photography and Locative Media.” Mobile Media & Communication 2 (1): 40–57.
Hoelzl, Ingrid, and Rémi Marie. 2015. Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image. Bristol: Intellect Books.
Jenkins, Reese V. 1975. “Technology and the Market: George Eastman and the Origins of Mass Amateur Photography.” Technology and Culture 16 (1): 1.
Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture—How New Technology Changes the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Basic Books.
Khoo, Elaine, Craig Hight, Rob Torrens, and Bronwen Cowie. 2017. “A Genealogy of Software Applications.” In Software Literacy, 15–29. Singapore: Springer.
Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage.
Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Lehmuskallio, Asko. 2016. “The Camera as a Sensor.” In Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices, edited by Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio, 243–266. New York: Routledge.
Lenzner, Ben, and Craig Hight. 2017. “The Challenges of Human Rights Video Making in the Global Network: The Case of WITNESS.” http://wi.mobilities.ca/the-challenges-of-human-rights-video-making-in-the-global-network-the-case-of-witness/.
Lister, Martin. 2013. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge.
Little, Mark. 2011. The Human Algorithm, May 20. https://storyful.com/blog/2011/05/20/the-human-algorithm-2/.
Mackenzie, Adrian. 2006. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang.
Männistö, Anssi. 2016. “The Boston Marathon Bombing Investigation as an Example of Networked Journalism and the Power of Big Data Analytics.” In Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices, edited by Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio, 86–97. New York: Routledge.
Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury.
McGrenere, Joanna, and Wayne Ho. 2000. “Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept.” In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000, 179–186, Montreal, Canada.
McPherson, Tara. 2013. “Some Theses on the Future of Humanities Publishing.” In Future Publishing: Visual Culture in the Age of Possibility, edited by K Behar et al. London: International Association for Visual Culture, March. http://iavc.org.uk/2013/future-publishing-visual-culture-in-the-age-of-possibility.
Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Munir, Kamal A., and Nelson Phillips. 2005. “The Birth of the ‘Kodak Moment’: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Adoption of New Technologies.” Organization Studies 26 (11): 1665–1687.
Murray, Susan. 2008. “Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2): 147–163.
Nash, Kate, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, eds. 2014. New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nichols, Bill. 2017. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pink, Sarah. 2016. “Photographic Places and Digital Wayfaring.” In Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices, edited by Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio, 186–190. New York: Routledge.
Pink, Sarah, and Vaike Fors. 2017. “Self-Tracking and Mobile Media: New Digital Materialities.” Mobile Media & Communication. 5 (3): 219–238.
Pomerantz, Jeffrey. 2015. Metadata. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Renov, Michael. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rubinstein, Daniel, and Katrina Sluis. 2008. “A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image.” Photographies 1 (1): 9–28.
Rubinstein, Daniel, and Katrina Sluis. 2013a. “Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image.” Photographies 6 (1): 151–158.
Rubinstein, Daniel, and Katrina Sluis. 2013b. “The Digital Image in Photographic Culture.” In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, edited by Martin Lister, 22–40. London: Routledge.
Smith, Marquard. 2013. “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability.” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (3): 375–403.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Steen-Johnsen, Kari, and Bernard Enjolras. 2015. “Social Research and Big Data—The Tension Between Opportunities and Realities.” In Internet Research Ethics, edited by Hallvard Fossheim and Helene Ingierd, 122–140. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk.
Van Dijck, José. 2014. “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data Between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology.” Surveillance & Society 12 (2): 197–208.
Winston, Brian. 2008. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. London: BFI.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hight, C. (2018). Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor and Metadata. In: Cammaer, G., Fitzpatrick, B., Lessard, B. (eds) Critical Distance in Documentary Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96766-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96767-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)