YouTube: fragments of a video-tropic atlas

In this article I make a plea for human geographers to make use of the rapidly growing collection of video materials that can be found on YouTube and other online collections. My tiny atlas of YouTube picks out three videos in order to exhibit the richness of audio-visual materials that can be found and to offer one potential form of video analysis. The three videos are common amateur genres on YouTube: home movies of family occasions, a video-blog and the counter-surveillance of the police. Against understanding these videos as ‘personal’, I argue that they are open to their ‘any-misation’ for the purposes of studying shared practices. In turning toward video, human geography gains a source of data on the temporal, embodied, bodily, material and mobile aspects of spatial practices. Brief analyses of the three videos are provided in order to show how we can investigate video practices as both documenting and reflexively constituting practices of gift-giving, caring for others and surveilling the police. Finally, I present a case for selecting ‘badly produced’ videos for good analytic reasons.

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