The concept of multiple texts:

There are three main types of texts that can be used in a multiple text method –spoken, written, and visual.

1. Spoken texts may include formal recorded interviews, informal conversations, and discussions with the researcher, group members, and others during the research project.

2. Written texts may include travel journals, poetry, letters, emails, books, articles, and other such texts.

3. Visual texts can include myriad different objects that are either made or collected or both by participants, or created by others. Some examples are drawings, art pieces, collected artifacts, visual objects, photographs (e.g., taken by participants, viewed in museums, on postcards), videotapes, visual media reports, and other image-based texts. 

Why is it important for our project? 

1. These types of texts are very helpful and useful when participants have difficulty recording emotions, impressions, or aspects that were difficult to put into words. Without a nonverbal means of expression, participants may be limited in how they articulate their experiences. This aspect made photography, drawing, and other visual expression an important type of text to include in this narrative method. 

2. Using a variety of narrative texts can serve both participants and researchers in gaining a richer and more complex understanding of participants’ experiences and generating new perspectives and knowledge.

3. Using multiple texts constructed through writing, speaking, and visual means opens the possibility for creating new realities of meaning and knowledge. 

4. Using multiple texts would also enrich ethnographic based research where written, spoken, and visual records of the context and cultural aspects

5. It allows to understand human experience

Vicarious witness:  when you take into account the impact of participants’ experiences as a result of feeling ‘as if’ they were taking part in the experience or feelings of another through the multiple means they used to gather information (reading, viewing evidence, images, or film, and participating in conversations, memorials, or rituals), make meaning of what they saw and heard, and take action within their communities after their experiences.

Source:

Keats, P. (2009). Multiple text analysis in narrative research: visual, written, and spoken stories of experience, Qualitative Research, vol 9no. 2, 181-195.