Return to January 2006 Funded Projects

The development of multimedia modules and hypermedia research methods in a visual evaluation.

John Doyle

Football 4 Peace is a co-existence project that uses football as a tool to get children in Israel's many communities to interact and play together. The project has grown over the last 5 years. The University of Brighton has been leading the project and it now counts the British Council and the Football Association among its partners. Football 4 Peace is now a registered charity.

This multimedia study will consist of the creation of an interactive website and the production of a number of digital films. These will range from digital documentaries of the individual projects, short films of the planning process, video diaries of participants, video records of fund raising events to a visual version of the Football 4 Peace coaching manual that has been created by the project team. All these digital resources will be made available via the web-site which will also house a forum and chat room to enable the coaches and the participants to continue their interactions after the coaching and football sessions finish. This will allow the project team to gather qualitative feedback on the project and to investigate this methodology as a tool for data collection in other contexts. Qualitative data will also be collected from the project team, the coaches and participants on their use and understanding gained from the films themselves .

The rationale for this approach is based on a number of considerations. Visual communication and documentation of the Football 4 Peace project are particularly relevant where many of the participants do not share a common language. In addition, sports students will benefit from direct engagement with multimedia/ hypermedia production as a creative process in its own right and as a methodology in the growing field of visual ethnography.

The final products will be an interactive website with short documentary films, a research forum, podcasts of research interviews and associated video and web- based learning resources. A case study of the project will also be undertaken and papers on the project submitted to peer-reviewed journals. In addition two modules on web-based sports journalism and audio and video production will be developed, supported by the research generated by the project.