pilotgreenland

Multimodal GoPro Collaboration

In collaboration with Pilots

Collaboration can be hugely rewarding with mutual interest. An important question - What is there to look for? The pilots were also curious to know how much their ‘helmet-eyes’ were inside the cockpit, wondering if the GoPro supported their hypothesis - if they were spending too much time looking at the instrument panel and not scanning outside as needed. Indeed, an important question for the training, as Pilot MarP and I discussed. To this point, before I left for fieldwork, the idea was to use the GoPro as an exploratory means. However, after reviewing the material with the two pilots, we realized that the GoPro captures vividly the visual field of the point of view from the helmet. Notably, it does not lend itself to an indication of where the eyes are looking. As we watched, we noticed the head moving - when he was looking inside and outside the cockpit, yet not where on the instrument panel or where outside the cockpit. The two pilots were asking at the time when helmeting the GoPro, “How much am I looking inside versus outside?” To this question, the GoPro did answer but not where.What the GoPro captured was the visual field, a field Gibson noted as a field where the eyes move with a point of view, not of a visually sensed world to perceive. It captured what can be captured via the helmet – in scanning in and out of the cockpit – this was the ‘data’ that was being recorded by the technical device and rendered a multimodal method, which recognizes the way research is mediated by technology (Westmoreland, 2022).

Collaboratively with the pilots and with the usage of the GoPro, a multimodal anthropology emerged. The multimedia of the GoPro has a supplementary quality to the written ethnographic accounts. By no means does it have film quality; rather, with text, the GoPro 1 - 5 min clips offer a ‘way of knowing.’ Utilizing the GoPro as a multimedia modality was entirely for its mobility, which places this ethnography of multimodal, the rest written.

There is a counter to how effective the GoPro was as a method. This has to do with whether elements of multimodal need explanation or structure to engage multisensorily. Although I explore multimodal practice with the technology of the GoPro as a conduit for collaboration, more often, I fall back on being descriptive. This seems to be because being interdisciplinary in covering aviation requires more explanation. Collaborative - yes, an image says a thousand words - not for this multimodal. The images from the GoPro do not stand alone. As a method to understand head movements in view of eye scanning, it holds ground. It holds ground for understanding Greenland’s flight environment, however, supplemented with the text on how ‘hostile’ is defined within aviation understandings.

GoPro