Video "is not simply a data collecting tool but a technology that participates in the negotiation of social relationships and a medium through which ethnographic knowledge is produced” (Pink, 2007). Audiovisual materials are not to be regarded as simple research objects but rather considered as indispensable elements of a methodological situated practice (Chauvin & Rex, 2015). The audiovisual recording of a specific social group is made under the authority of a Researcher who has their own freedom over practices of shooting, assembling, editing, analyzing and presenting data (Ibanez-Bueno, 2019).

However, this freedom involves negotiations with the recorded participants, their informed consent and most of all, an acute skill set. Thus, “although metaphors of ‘‘recording’’, ‘‘capturing’’, ‘‘acquiring’’, and ‘‘gathering’’ are often used to speak about the constitution of video corpora in the social sciences, video data are neither ‘‘offered’’, ‘‘found’’, nor ‘‘given’’. Rather, they are actively assembled by a range of practices” (Mondada, 2009). Those practices include for instance choosing the right equipment, the adequate locations for the cameras and audio recorders, the relevant time frame and then digitizing in particular formats, assembling data in specific ways, selecting and editing shots.

Moreover, Researchers can turn the visual data into a final publishing material guiding the reader-spectator through semiotic and narrative enrichment realized in post-production. Video thus constitutes a mode of analytical representation in itself that follows a scenario created beforehand by the Researcher. Video capsules as dynamic illustrations form an innovative method of restituting data analysis and participate in the renewal of multimodal interaction analysis by making use of the technological tools available to Researchers in Digital Humanities.