First Person Perspective Digital Ethnography

Much of social research tries to understand the perspective of others. Researchers try to understand the reasons guiding peoples' actions, their situated thoughts, what they are influenced by in the social environment, how people respond to things, and why people respond differently. What if social researchers could objectively view the given behaviour from the inside? If they could then use that objective account to interview participants and explore their situated thoughts? In short, what if they could actually step into the perspective of others?

The proposed seminar series will spearhead the use of new mobile digital technologies to obtain first person perspective audio-visual recordings of situated human behaviour. Using mobile miniature high-definition cameras researchers have begun to 'step into' the visual, auditory, temporal and activity perspective of participants. For example, the SenseCam (Hodges et al., 2006), developed by Microsoft, in Cambridge UK, is a camera worn around the neck, it uses a fish-eye lens to take photographs of the users' visual environment at either set intervals or in response to changes in that environment. The SubCam (Lahlou, 1999), another device, uses a miniature audio-video recorder attached to glasses to record activity sequences from the perspective of the actor. These and other devices, such as mobile eye tracking systems, are going to become powerful new research tools providing unprecedented access into the perspective of actors as they behave in diverse 'real-world' contexts, such as, policing, industry, and health.

The pioneering use of these new mobile first-person perspective recording technologies have revealed five issues which need to be addressed: (1) What are the real-world contexts in which these technologies might be most useful? (2) What novel academic questions are raised by these new technologies? (3) How can this rich multi-media data be analysed? (4) What Code of Ethics should guide the collections, storage and presentation of this data? And finally (5) how should future technological developments incorporate applied, academic, methodological and ethical concerns?

The proposed series of five seminars will address each of these issues in turn. Academics at various stages in their careers will join with technology developers, and potential beneficiaries in industry, policing and health to discuss key presentations on each of the five issues. Each seminar will produce an output which attempts to answer each of the above questions. The presentations and outputs will be made available to the wider research community through a clearly structured website which will act as a resource for first person perspective digital ethnography. Moreover, the investigators, in partnership with the LSE and industry partners will make first person perspective recording technology and software suitable for the analysis of such data freely available to interested researchers in academia and beyond.

There will be two groups of non-academic beneficiaries: technology developers and applied researchers.

1) TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPERS
Who: Technology developers (such as Microsoft, Reveal Media, and VideoVest) have been working on mobile point of view data recording for several years. Minaturisation, incorporation of eye-tracking, HD quality, and integration with additional sensors is being pursued by a range of companies (i.e., Tobii, Vicon, Contour and ASL Eye-Tracking)

What: The issue facing developers is: How should future recording technology be designed to most benefit applied and academic research communities? The seminars will help technology developers to better address applied, theoretical, methodological and ethical issues in their future development of FPP research technologies.

How: UK based technology developers from Microsoft, Reveal Media, VideoVest, and Vicon will be invited to participate in the seminar series, and they will have a Seminar dedicated to their interest of developing a technology specification sheet to guide for future developments. This Seminar will occur at the end in order to incorporate applied, theoretical, methodological and ethical issues.

2) APPLIED RESEARCHERS IN INDUSTRY, HEALTH, POLICING AND MARKETING
Who: First Person Perspective data collection already has a user base. For example, it is already being used in the fields of industry (i.e., Danone and EDF), health, policing and marketing. Also, first person perspective photography has been recognized as a powerful rehabilitative memory aid by many clinicians (see, Browne et al., 2011).

What: Despite increasing use, there remains uncertainty about: what data collection technologies are most suitable? What literature exists on using these methods? How can this complex data be analyzed? What ethical guidelines should be followed when gathering, storing and presenting first person perspective data? The unique mix of stakeholders involved in the seminars will be able to advance these questions.

How: Applied researchers will benefit in four ways: (1) Representatives from the Police (Neil McGuinness-Smith), industry (Salvator Di Benedetto), marketing (Tony Lewis) and rehabilitation services (Brian O'Neill) will participate in the seminar series. Specifically, the first Seminar will be dedicated to addressing their experiences of gathering first person perspective data. (2) The website will act as a resource, building a network of researchers, making available presentations, a bibliography, a code of ethics, and suggestions for data analysis. (3) SubCam technology and DIVER software licenses will be made freely available to applied and academic researchers. (4) Future technological developments, informed by the specification sheet, will feed into the future potentials of first person perspective data collection and be advertised through the website.