Neal Feigenson

What Is Visual Knowledge, and What Is It Good For? Potential Ethnographic Lessons from the Field of Legal Practice

A firm basis exists for an instructive exchange between anthropologists and legal scholars regarding the production, dissemination, and interpretation of visual meaning in this digital era. The practice and theory of law and anthropology today are increasingly being shaped and informed by what appears on electronic screens—in the field, the workplace, and inside the classroom. Practicing lawyers and ethnographers need new tools of analysis and representation to meet the intellectual and aesthetic demands of digital visual rhetoric. This article offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the visual meaning-making process on the open source borderland between disciplinary expertise and pop cultural communication.

Animating the Bomber: The Sydney Bomber Trial

When visual evidence is shown in court, specific features of the media employed and jurors’ experiences with those media in their everyday lives affect their responses. Computer animations can depict what film or video cannot record, but precisely because animations can depict anything whatever, their truthfulness can be questioned. Yet animations also share key features with film and video that encourage belief: the flow of images diverts viewers from the details of any single frame, and movement itself enhances verisimilitude. Jurors’ experiences of seeing animations as news and as science and of interacting with computer games can imbue evidentiary animations with added credibility. Appreciating these aspects of the medium can help all participants in legal proceedings to better assess the persuasive benefits and judgemental risks of courtroom animations.