Theoretical and Practical Considerations Concerning the Use of Larger Qualitative Samples for the Documentary Interpretation of Pictures : Computer-Assisted Image Assessment and the Iconic Operationalization of Tinder Profiles

As the empirical branch of the praxeological sociology of knowledge, the documentary method (Bohnsack, 1999; Mannheim, 1982) aims to explicate the implicit and conjunctive knowledge that constitutes milieu-specific constructions of reality. The goal of this method is to identify and further explicate the dominant habitus within social spaces, as well as to understand the researched milieus themselves. The documentary picture interpretation (Bohnsack, 2008, 2011, 2020a) is a comparatively new branch of empirical research within the praxeological sociology of knowledge that combines the documentary method by Ralf Bohnsack (1999) and Karl Mannheim (1964, 1982), the iconological approach by Erwin Panofsky (1979), and the iconic by Max Imdahl (1996). It aims to explicate the theoretical and practice-guiding knowledge of social actors through the pictures they produce and authenticate. The present essay focuses chiefly on the documentary interpretation of pictures produced as artefacts of everyday life1 as the central object of empirical research.