Methodological Problems of Visual History

Abstract

Visual history emerged as a research trend resulting from transformations of contemporary verbal culture into audiovisual. Verbal culture created historiography, i.e. reflections on the past understood as more or less scientific and literary writing of history. Owing to advanced media communication technologies: photography, film, TV, video, DVD, and computers, visual culture made it possible to conduct reflection on the past by means of analog and digital, moving and static, or talking and silent pictures of different origin. Visual history opposes the dominance of conceptual language, and printed or written historical narratives in learning about, studying and presenting the past. It points out that the past and history can be thought of with a positive cognitive effect not only in terms of conceptual language but also by means of diverse texts, sounds and pictures integrated in particular media, i.e. audiovisual presentations. Visual history suggests that academic history should use media technologies to conduct studies and present their results as various audiovisual forms of expression. Audiovisual forms of reflection on the past pose new methodological and epistemological requirements on historians (overwhelmingly trained in the paradigm of verbal culture) because they mould the presented historical worlds in a different form than in classic written narratives. Traditional historical narrative as the text is characterized by the fact of being static, silent and linear. Written historical narrative is unable to provide opportunities to encounter non-linguistic products of culture, visual and sound effects which, as products of a different frame of reference, elude conceptualization procedures. Audiovisual and multimedia forms of historical reflection are characterized by simultaneity, dynamism, intermediality, and interactivity. The screen can simultaneously show the whole visible spectrum of the experienced worlds: colors, architecture, clothes, hair styles, furnishings, movement, sound, etc. The historical world on screen appears to be far more complicated than the one we are dealing with in linear and sequential written historical narrative. Research categories developed by historiography are not useful in analyses conducted in the area of visual history. Consequently, visual history as a very young discipline makes use of methodologies developed in other sciences such as media science, semiotics, history of art, picture anthropology, and media archeology. Visual history is a specialization which is based on an eclectic methodology, one that enables exploration of audiovisual historical sources with a positive cognitive result in the widest scope possible.