DigiPlay: Experience and Consequence of Technologies of Leisure

Mobile Leisure and the Technological Mediascape

Oak Suite, Dept of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH
26th April 2004

The Transmediation of Leisure: Some methodological problems

Nils Lindahl-Elliot
n.lindahl@uwe.ac.uk
University of the West of England, Bristol

This paper will consider some methodological issues arising in the context of a research project about family constructions of science and nature in zoos. The project, ‘The New Zoos: Science, Media and Culture’, investigates the way in which families attend to popular science and nature in relation to, and as part of, dynamics of transmediation—the recontextualization of modalities, or aspects of modalities, of observation. Transmediation involves the maintenance and transgression of contexts by way of a kind of travelling which is at one and the same time imaginary and embodied. I will argue that the peculiarly anachronistic nature of zoos—where anachrony is understood not as a matter of obsolescence but as the heterochronicity of practice—creates a rich context in which to research transmediation. It also raises a number of questions in regard to the ways in which transmediation may itself be observed, and in effect overcoded for the purposes of critical research. I will be considering some of these questions in relation to three contexts of method: participant meta-observation at the zoo; auto-ethnographic observation by way of video diaries; and collective meta-observation in family interviews.

Dr Nils Lindahl-Elliot is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is currently the principal investigator of an ESRC project titled ‘The New Zoos: Science, Media and Culture’.

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