Bella Dicks

Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Faculty Member

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I am a professor of Sociology at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Previously I worked at Sheffield Hallam University. I recently completed a three-year secondment to Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. I'm interested in how people and organisations use heritage, collective memory and a sense of the past in their social practices, identities and projects. I'm particularly interested in the class dimensions of this.I also have a longstanding research interest in qualitative methodology, particularly digital, multimodal and sensory methods

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Papers by Bella Dicks

Industrial heritage as place-making – the case of Wales

Berghahn Books, Sep 30, 2019

Out of the Ashes?: The Social Impact of Industrial Contraction and Regeneration on Britain's Mining Communities

REGIONS, CITIES AND PUBLIC POLICY SERIES Series Editor: Ron Martin, Department of Geography, Univ... more

Community Responses to Pit Closure in the Post-strike Era1

Community Development Journal, 1994

In 1984-5, the British coalmining industry experienced its longest and most bitter conflict. The ... more

Heritage as a Social Practice

<p>A useful way of understanding heritage is through examining how specific practices gener... more <p>A useful way of understanding heritage is through examining how specific practices generate different types of value. There are multiple practices that constitute the "nexus" of heritage-making, but this chapter focuses on two principal ones: how practices of production relate to those of "consumption," and how these in turn link to people's feelings of inheriting, or identifying with, a particular past</p>

Going Beyond the Code

Social Science Computer Review, Nov 1, 2001

New developments in multimedia and hypermedia technology have raised important questions for the ... more New developments in multimedia and hypermedia technology have raised important questions for the conduct and dissemination of sociological research. Attention has traditionally focused on uses of new media for teaching, but their application to research is now also becoming clearer. There has been particular interest-although little practical work so far-on how ethnographers might use hypermedia in planning, design, analysis, and presentation of ethnographic work. This article offers findings from the authors' current ESRC project, which examines the appropriateness of hypermedia for the production of ethnography. The theoretical and methodological implications for sociological knowledge of this new technology are discussed. The authors also address arguments about the potential for transforming the production of sociological knowledge through granting equal weight to the audiovisual plane of meaning as that given to the verbal and situate their discussion within debates over new forms of reading and authoring offered to sociology through electronic media.

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Qualitative Research and Hypermedia

Multimodal ethnography

Qualitative Research, Feb 1, 2006

Ethnographers, like other researchers, currently have a broad range of media at their disposal fo... more Ethnographers, like other researchers, currently have a broad range of media at their disposal for conducting fieldwork, for aiding analysis and, most challengingly, for representing their completed work. These include digital media such as photographs, video film, audio-recordings, graphics and others besides. Through the computer ‘writing space’, these media can be integrated together, alongside more conventional written interpretation, into hypermedia environments. However, integration poses a number of potential problems, which this article addresses through a discussion of the semiotics of multimedia. In particular, it argues that different media can be seen to ‘afford’ different kinds of meaning. The integration of different media, therefore, has potentially significant implications for ethnography. Rather than seeing these media forms as discrete, we suggest an approach to ethnographic work which sees meaning as emerging from the fusion of differently mediated forms into new, ‘multi-semiotic’ modes. We therefore recognize the need to go beyond the current interest in visual methods, and instead to develop ways of understanding what kinds of meanings are produced in multimodal ethnographic work.

Clickable data: hypermedia and social research

Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2011

Qualitative data sharing and reuse: mapping the ethical terrain [briefing paper]

This paper considers some of the key ethical debates and issues associated with preparing qualita... more This paper considers some of the key ethical debates and issues associated with preparing qualitative data for archiving and reuse. The paper particularly addresses the archiving and reuse of qualitative multi-media digital data, although many of the issues will be generic to qualitative data preparation more generally. The paper arises out of work being undertaken as part of a project concerned with exploring the methodological issues associated with qualitative data sharing and archiving.

Qualitative Research and Hypermedia: Ethnography for the Digital Age

Publikationsansicht. 43667573. Qualitative research and hypermedia: ethnography for the digitalag... more

Possibilities of multimedia qualitative data archiving and sharing using eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) [Briefing Paper]

This paper presents an overview of what eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is and how it might be a... more

Hypermedia methods for qualitative research

Guilford Press eBooks, 2008

Hypertext, Hypermedia and Qualitative Methods

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Jun 20, 2016

Ethnographic Paradigms: Technologies and Representations

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Jun 20, 2016

Inclusive governance? : the case of 'minority' and voluntary sector groups and the National Assembly for Wales /

Contemporary Wales, 2000

In-between practice: working in the ‘thirdspace’ of sensory and multimodal methodology

Qualitative Research, Jun 1, 2011

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction ... more This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and ‘reading’ practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants’ and researchers’ worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants’ interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the ‘sensory turn’ centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the ‘place’ for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.

Encoding and Decoding the People

European Journal of Communication, Mar 1, 2000

This article notes the `vernacular aesthetic' at work in the new breed of experience-centred ... more This article notes the `vernacular aesthetic' at work in the new breed of experience-centred heritage museums, which foreground and celebrate the ordinary lives of `the people'. It seeks to understand how constructs of `the people' are produced at such museums. Many existing treatments of heritage museums have analysed them as symptoms of totalizing trends, rather than coming to terms with how they work as sites of cultural communication. By drawing on Stuart Hall's theory of encoding/decoding, the article presents a linked analysis of the encoding and decoding of `the people' at a heritage museum in South Wales. It discusses how this museum was set up, through particular relations of production and frameworks of knowledge, and shows how the heritage texts are the negotiated and hybrid outcome of the conflicts that shaped encoding. It then traces the circuit of communication through to a visitor study, which asked visitors what impressions of `the people then' they had formed during their visit. A particular concern was to explore how visitors positioned their present lives in relation to the past, and how popular mythologies of `community' are deployed in this process.

Heritage and Social Class

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015

This is the voice of ‘ordinary’ Bryn Rees, a retired miner from the Rhondda Valleys in South Wale... more This is the voice of ‘ordinary’ Bryn Rees, a retired miner from the Rhondda Valleys in South Wales, UK, addressing visitors to the colliery where he used to work. It has now become the Rhondda Heritage Park, a ‘living history’ heritage centre, where Bryn tells the story of his life in the 1950s, shortly after nationalization of the coal industry. He is speaking from a time of collective and organizational strength for coal-miners and other industrial workers. Yet his optimism, as we know, proved false, given that those ever-quickening changes sweeping him and other miners along ultimately proved fatal to the UK and European coal industry. Listeners have stepped into this 1950s world from one virtually bereft of its old centres of industrial monopoly — in coal, steel, shipbuilding, railways — which have now become either ruined and impoverished or regenerated into new consumer-oriented urban areas. Bryn’s words, therefore, evoke a sense of loss and powerlessness. It is a loss that is also, inevitably, about the loss of a cultural image of the working class. Manual industrial occupations are memorialized in a range of ‘ordinary’ heritage sites in the UK. Beamish Open Air Museum in Tyneside, Big Pit in Wales, Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester, the Welsh Slate Museum at Llanberis, Museum of London Docklands, the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, the People’s History Museum in Manchester, and others besides, all display working-class lives, communities and occupations.

QR in reflexive mode: The participatory turn and interpretive social science

Qualitative Research, May 9, 2019

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Hypermedia and Ethnography: Reflections on the Construction of a Research Approach

Sociological Research Online, Sep 1, 1998

Current interest in ethnography within social research has focused on its potential to offer insi... more Current interest in ethnography within social research has focused on its potential to offer insights into the complexity of the social world. There have increasingly been calls for ethnography to reflect this complexity more adequately. Two aspects of ethnographic enquiry have been particularly singled out as areas in need of redefinition: the delineation of ethnography's object of study and its mode of presentation. Both of these areas are implicated in the recent attention to the possibilities of hypermedia authoring for ethnography. The paper offers a discussion of this potential in the light of an ongoing research project with which the authors are engaged. The project is designed to enable this potential to be assessed, and to provide for the construction of what the authors call an ethnographic hypermedia environment (EHE). We believe that the promise of hypermedia lies not only in its facility for non-sequential data organisation, but also in its ability to integrate data in different media. The synthesis of the visual, aural, verbal and pictorial planes of meaning holds considerable promise for the expansion and deepening of ethnographic knowledge. Consequently, we suggest that hypermedia has implications for all stages of the research process, and argue against the current tendency to see it as merely a tool either for analysis or for presentation. These arguments are illustrated by means of a commentary on some work in progress.

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Industrial heritage as place-making – the case of Wales

Berghahn Books, Sep 30, 2019

Out of the Ashes?: The Social Impact of Industrial Contraction and Regeneration on Britain's Mining Communities

REGIONS, CITIES AND PUBLIC POLICY SERIES Series Editor: Ron Martin, Department of Geography, Univ... more

Community Responses to Pit Closure in the Post-strike Era1

Community Development Journal, 1994

In 1984-5, the British coalmining industry experienced its longest and most bitter conflict. The ... more

Heritage as a Social Practice

Going Beyond the Code

Social Science Computer Review, Nov 1, 2001

Download

Qualitative Research and Hypermedia

Multimodal ethnography

Qualitative Research, Feb 1, 2006

Clickable data: hypermedia and social research

Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2011

Qualitative data sharing and reuse: mapping the ethical terrain [briefing paper]

Qualitative Research and Hypermedia: Ethnography for the Digital Age

Publikationsansicht. 43667573. Qualitative research and hypermedia: ethnography for the digitalag... more

Possibilities of multimedia qualitative data archiving and sharing using eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) [Briefing Paper]

This paper presents an overview of what eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is and how it might be a... more

Hypermedia methods for qualitative research

Guilford Press eBooks, 2008

Hypertext, Hypermedia and Qualitative Methods

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Jun 20, 2016

Ethnographic Paradigms: Technologies and Representations

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Jun 20, 2016

Inclusive governance? : the case of 'minority' and voluntary sector groups and the National Assembly for Wales /

Contemporary Wales, 2000

In-between practice: working in the ‘thirdspace’ of sensory and multimodal methodology

Qualitative Research, Jun 1, 2011

Encoding and Decoding the People

European Journal of Communication, Mar 1, 2000

Heritage and Social Class

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015

QR in reflexive mode: The participatory turn and interpretive social science

Qualitative Research, May 9, 2019

Download

Hypermedia and Ethnography: Reflections on the Construction of a Research Approach

Sociological Research Online, Sep 1, 1998

Download

Out of the Ashes? The Social Impact of Industrial Contraction and Regeneration on Britain’s Mining Communities (with Waddington, D., Critcher, C., and Parry, D.)

Children, Place and Identity (with Scourfield, I., Drakeford, M. and Davies, A. )

Qualitative research and Hypermedia: ethnography for the digital age (with Mason, B., Coffey, A. and Atkinson, P.)

Culture on Display: The production of contemporary visitability

Heritage, Place and Community

Digital Qualitative Research Methods

'Community': a useful concept in heritage studies?

by Stefan Berger and Bella Dicks

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Online Journal (Jun 2019)

This article aims to show the clearly differentiated national context in which concepts of commun... more This article aims to show the clearly differentiated national context in which concepts of community as used in heritage developed from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In the first part of this article, we look at the origins of the academic use of 'community' in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present day arguing that its association with National Socialism has tainted the concept permanently. In the second part of this article, we move to France, where we also find a long-term scepticism when it comes to the concept of community. The strong republican tradition, which mistrusted everything that was capable of constructing identities that would divide and compartmentalise the republican ethos, rejected notions of community. Ideas associated with community were usually seen as particularist and therefore incompatible with the universalism of republicanism in France. In the final part of the article, we compare the sceptical reception of 'community' in the German and French cases with a far more positive left-wing tradition of community studies in Britain. The comparison of the uses of the concept of community in those three countries shows how a transnational dialogue can lead to more theoretically aware use of the concept of 'community'.

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Bella Dicks

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