Research Journeys: Making the Invisible Visual

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DOI

We argue for a new way of using pictorial publications to communicate the social, cultural, and material contexts in which “in the wild” research is carried out. Such research often allows for partial researcher perspectives, as the researchers travel to, encounter, and leave those places. However, in HCI research, the journeys and interactions in and around those places are rarely reported directly in archival papers. We argue that those journeys and interactions directly inform how we make sense of the project, and thus should be recorded and shared appropriately. We argue that pictorials can be a format that breaks the boundary between “supplementary materials” and archival publications, and allows us to do that sharing function. We illustrate this argument through reporting of our Research Journey to a number of islands off the west coast of Ireland as part of a project that is developing technology to support rural community radio.