Innovative techniques in tourism research: an exploration of visual methods and academic filmmaking

While visual methods have long been utilised as legitimate research techniques in the social sciences, within mainstream tourism research these techniques are rarely employed. This paper thus seeks to question current research practices in tourism by focusing on academic filmmaking as an innovative visual method which can be used to approach tourism research in a new way and to create tourism knowledge which is widely accessible. Two case studies explicate these points: an ethnographic documentary about tourism impacts in Crete, and a doctoral project which explored the construction and consumption of images of Greekness by visitors to the Athenian Acropolis. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Researcher with a movie camera: visual ethnography in the field

This paper seeks to ‘promote’ the use of moving image visual ethnography within tourism research while concurrently acknowledging the methodological and practical challenges inherent in the use of this method. The paper introduces Dziga Vertov's 1929 Vertov, D. (Director). 1929. The man with the movie camera (duration: 67 minutes), Moscow: VUFKU.  [Google Scholar] groundbreaking film ‘The Man With the Movie Camera’ and argues that a certain parallel can be drawn between the film and contemporary moving image visual ethnography in so far as the latter is, like Vertov's film, about the glimpses of the everyday as perceived by the researcher/filmmaker. Important within this context is the role of the ‘self’ of the researcher, something further explored through a case study of academic filmmaking, a project which investigates the construction and consumption of images of Greekness by visitors to the Athenian Acropolis. This case also highlights the practical challenges involved in adopting this method and investigates various filming techniques which could successfully be used by tourism researchers to either ‘collect data’ or create ethnographic documentaries, which can in turn be used for a range of other academic and pedagogic purposes. The paper concludes that being a ‘researcher with a movie camera’ although challenging can prove to be remarkably fruitful and rewarding, especially in the context of tourism studies.