The Atlas and the Film: Collective storytelling through soundscapes, sightscapes, and virtualscapes

Abstract

In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources we encounter in visual ethnography, as well as of our own capacity for visual engagement: on the one hand a potentially infinite analytics, on the other our own storytelling engagement through film-making.