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Sharing photographs and photo-chatting are common practices in doing family at a distance. This study looks at the processes of the production and circulation of photographs within the family network, analysing participants’ narratives about their image-based communication in WhatsApp. The data was collected as an ethnographic enquiry into the digitally mediated (transnational) family communication of five Polish women and their children living in Finland. It consists of five auto-driven visual elicitation interviews with an interactive collage, three elicitation interviews, with the participant’s smartphone used for fast reference to their in-app chats, and one semi-structured interview. The in-app photographs are explored as ‘imagetext’, that is, visual and verbal representations that create the WhatsApp ‘iconology’ of family visual communication. In participants’ narratives, photographs are regarded as an obligation (always to be sent to somebody), evidence (of being somewhere or achieving something), or a form of visual co-presence with living-apart relatives. Photo-chatting entertains (images of pets), provides expertise (snaps of medication), or is used to show off (photos taken at competitions). Photo-chatting helps to maintain family relationships by showing affection, comforting, and caring over a distance. peerReviewed

In ethnographically oriented linguistic landscape studies, social spaces are studied in co-operation with research participants, many times through mobile encounters such as walking. Talking, walking, photographing and video recording as well as writing the fieldwork diary are activities that result in the accumulation of heterogeneous, multimodal corpora. We analyze data from a Hungarian school ethnography project to reconstruct fieldwork encounters and analyze embodiment, the handling of devices (e.g. the photo camera) and verbal interaction in exploratory, participant-led walking tours. Our analysis shows that situated practices of embodied conduct and verbal interaction blur the boundaries between observation and observers, and thus LL research is not only about space- and place-making and sense-making routines, but the fieldwork encounters are also transformative and contribute to space- and place-making themselves. Our findings provide insight for ethnographic researchers and enrich the already robust qualitative and quantitative strategies employed in the field.

This article provides a rare opportunity to follow the inception of mining and mine exploration economy in the first years of the European presence in colonial Zambia and Katanga as seen through the eyes of prospectors and mining experts working for the London-based company Tanganyika Concessions Limited. It draws on company records as well as the personal records of the early company employees who worked in North Western Rhodesia and adjoining Katanga until 1906. The most thought-provoking documents include diaries, letters and photographs, which depict the organisation and processes of early mining work, modes of mine exploration, and relations within the first mining communities and between white management and African labour. The wide range of available materials makes the Tanganyika Concessions a relevant case study; they offer a fuller picture of the inception of European mining and mine exploration in North Western Rhodesia and Katanga than is available elsewhere. Taken as a whole, they provide insight into the operation of colonising processes: in particular how these processes took place, why they were considered desirable by various interest groups, and the impact that these processes had on physical and human environments in parts of North Western Rhodesia and Katanga. peerReviewed

Only abstract. Paper copies of master’s theses are listed in the Helka database (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Electronic copies of master’s theses are either available as open access or only on thesis terminals in the Helsinki University Library. Vain tiivistelmä. Sidottujen gradujen saatavuuden voit tarkistaa Helka-tietokannasta (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Digitaaliset gradut voivat olla luettavissa avoimesti verkossa tai rajoitetusti kirjaston opinnäytekioskeilla. Endast sammandrag. Inbundna avhandlingar kan sökas i Helka-databasen (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Elektroniska kopior av avhandlingar finns antingen öppet på nätet eller endast tillgängliga i bibliotekets avhandlingsterminaler. The thesis analyses the differences in the ways key stakeholder groups are pictured in corporate photography of fifteen multinational corporations in three different sectors of economy. The data is extracted from annual reports of the corporations for the year 2005. The focus of the work is on corporate public relations, not advertising. The thesis applies the social semiotic theory of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen to corporate photographs. It combines the Kress and van Leeuwen framework with the Peircean concepts of firstness, secondness and thirdness, first proposed in the context of photography by Merja Salo. The method of the work, a variant of quantitative content analysis, is developed from Anssi Männistö’s image analysis method. The thesis shows that there are significant differences in the ways different corporate stakeholder groups are represented in corporate photography. The key differences are shown to be between representations of corporate management and other groups. The study shows that the representations of international corporate management are extremely uniform, and that there seem to be tight limits for the representations of corporate management. The management is uniformly pictured as engaging the reader in the style of a traditional portrait. There are also tight limits for the expression of emotion and feeling in corporate photography. The only emotional states that are present in the data are smiles or relatively neutral facial expressions. Negative emotion is not displayed by any stakeholder groups. There study shows that there is much more fluctuation in the ways employees and customers are represented, compared with the management. Corporate employees and customers are used as anonymous illustrations to the report, and they are given meaning through their vocational position at best, instead of their individual identities. The thesis suggests that the pictorial representations of the various stakeholder groups constitute a metanarrative, defined in the work as a presentation by the management to the shareholders, in which employees and customers act as evidence of the efficiency of the corporation. The metanarrative is compared to John Berger’s theory of the narrative of oil painting, which describes a continuity between advertising and classical oil painting. According to Berger, the key function of oil painting was to picture the commissioner of the painting surrounded by his estate and possessions, and act in this way as evidence of the commissioner’s wealth. The thesis suggests that the corporation presented in the annual report, as well as its employees and customers as stakeholders, can be understood, adapting the narrative of oil painting, as the estate and possessions of the management. They are then used to convince the shareholders, acting as the audience, of the efficiency and value of the corporation.