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Abstract
In a study of ‘disadvantaged’ Australian rural women on access scholarships at an elite metropolitan university, I explored the complex amalgam of agency, imagination and personal experience at the nexus of higher education mobility. Alongside the 200 digital photographs the participants took to explain their mobility away from ‘home’ and the transcripted interviews over four years about the photographs, I felt that a new approach to visual data was needed in order to ‘see’ their stories. Experimenting with the two texts of my own research, one of words – the transcript – and one without words – the photographs, I began to juxtapose photographs I was using for analysis with the transcripts that went with it. First motivated by Gee’s insistence that language has poetic features coupled with inspiration from St. Pierre’s model of writing as a way of analysis, I began placing transcripted words into poetic stanzas, noting changes of tone and repetition of certain words and phrases as I heard them on the tape. Working with the two forms of data as interdependent, an evocative and powerful form of data presentation emerged, an interpretive form of representation I call ‘interpretive visual texts’.