Description
'Methodological Issues in conducting Interviews with Artists': Digital technology brought 'authors' opportunities for creativity like never before but also posed important hurdles for the doctrines of copyright and moral rights. It prompted legislative developments at international level to strengthen existing copyright law in favour of right holders, while moral rights remained acknowledged but ignored; and also led to an extensive theoretical debate in the academic world, which continues till today. The focus in both legislative developments and academic literature has remained around technical issues of digitization, concerns of businesses and economic efficiency, effects on cultural and social aspects of society and balance between private rights and larger public interest. Remarkably, there aren't sufficient empirical studies to back such claims. More importantly, despite the excuse of "protection of authors" being used to bring in legislative changes and "nature of authorship" being discussed widely in the literature, the voices of the "authors" remain absent. Both, the strong need for empirical research in this area and the potential for such studies to make a significant contribution to existing theoretical knowledge have been pointed out but remain unaddressed. This paper first outlines the studies carried out in the UK in the last decade involving artists or addressing their perspective in relation to the copyright issues as outlined above. It summarizes the nature and objectives of the same and also points out how such empirical studies remain few and far between. Second, the paper examines the methodological issues in designing and conducting a study involving interviews with artists drawing on insights derived from a qualitative research on the perspective of digital artists in the UK and Ireland, on the process of creation and the laws protecting authors in the digital environment. It describes methodological issues relating to data collection like sampling, access, mode of interview and overall study design. The paper also goes on to make some recommendations for conducting qualitative interviews with this sample group.| Period | 2008 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Montreal, CanadaShow on map |