Afterword:

Methodological Diffraction in Digital Visual Studies

By Laurie E. Gries

This collection’s overall aim has been to contribute to discussions about visual methodology by exploring new visual research potentials afforded by engagement with emergent technologies and media practices. The first part of the collection includes experimentations meant to demonstrate the unique affordances of different methodologies and methods for DVS and to inspire more inventive play. There we find the contributing authors drawing on a wide range of methodologies and methods by taking risks to experiment with 3-D printing, social media archiving, augmented reality, glitching, iconographic tracking, digital media archaeology, macroscopic methodologies, and virtual geosemiotics. The second part of the collection offers insights from scholars who themselves have undertaken significant visual studies projects such as designing and building digital archives to developing cartographic and critical data interventions to producing digital texts and documentaries. In addition to identifying both the values and limitations of the experimental work in the first part of the collection, the second part explores the ethics of doing DVS, shares insightful hows and whys of doing DVS, and envisions future directions for DVS.

In this collection’s sustained emphasis on doing, we hope that DVS will be perceived as a constructive process-based scholarship. Toward that aim, we have included multiple tutorials, discussed multiple strategies for doing DVS research, and made public multiple archives to encourage more research play with Obama Hope related data. Our intention here is not to cement what DVS research entails but to invite endless possibilities for inventive play even at the risk of failure. As such, borrowing from the words of John Cage and the Experimental Research Methods Group, we ask that DVS “be judged not on its success or failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown” (qtd. in “About”). This is especially important in that we recognize DVS as an interplay of digital visual experimentations whose full potential is best attained in message events generated through responsive interaction (see “About”).

We hope this collection also inspires more diverse experimentation in digital visual studies, using graduate courses/programs, conferences, and workshops as opportunities to foster such inventive play. As such, I want to devote this afterward to addressing an important set of anticipated questions. When doing DVS, how does one decide which methodology and/or method is best or most appropriate? Is it better to adapt traditional methods invented by others or get inventive and innovative to generate a method anew? And in the latter case—and especially because, as Joyce Carter (2015) notes, innovation is "a product of risk-taking with no guarantee of reward, and the very real possibility of failure"—is it really worth one’s time and energy to experiment, especially if a project has potential to fail?

These questions have haunted me since my own graduate education. When I was defending my prospectus on the method of iconographic tracking, one of my outside readers for the prospectus (and a scholar who I greatly admire) asked me, what if I fail? In a respectful tone, but with naïve audacity, perhaps, I answered so what? Dissertations should be intellectual experiments, and, as a discipline, we should value projects that take risks and promote learning, even if failure occurs. Of course, this confidence in the face of failure is often born of a privileged perspective and position. I was 38 at the time—despicably confident as a white, married, cishet woman with a middle-class upbringing that if I did not land a job due to a failed project, it would be financially and emotionally okay. Many graduate students (and faculty and staff for that matter) do not have the luxury of pursuing their work without an immense fear of failure—especially with institutionalized racisms at work, financial insecurities abound, and, among other factors, an overly competitive academic job market placing undue pressure on one's methodological choices. These factors are real and materially consequential, and I do not want to underplay them. But too often fear of failure stifles productive experimentation, I believe institutions, disciplines, and programs ought to be finding ways to support more, not less, risk taking in the face of failure for both the sake of individual learning and the sake of disciplinary knowledge.

Working with this assumption in mind and with the hopes of offering a working heuristic for methodological invention and adoption, the rest of this afterword deploys Karen Barad's diffractive methodology to review patterns of research choices made, as well as consequential potentials opened up, by both the contributors of and respondents to the DVS experiments in this collection. In considering how shifting technological infrastructures continue to constrain future methodological actions, I ultimately call not only for more methodological diversity but also for more methodological experimentation in digital visual studies.

Making Methodological Choices in Digital Visual Studies

Oft times, as in other areas of study, choice about methodology and method in digital visual studies relates directly to a specific visual artifact or genre that piques our socio-political interests for some reason. For instance, for our chapter in this collection, Bratta and I were interested in how the emergent new media genre called the Trumpicon is contributing to the contemporary racial politics of circulation. In previous scholarship, we had explored how Trumpicons proliferate white supremacist logics, but we did not have a clear understanding of how Trumpicons sometimes resist them as well. For this DVS project, then, we decided to marry critical genre studies, critical race studies, and iconographic tracking to help shed light on where Trumpicons are surfacing, what rhetorical activities they are becoming embroiled in, and how they are resisting white supremacist, post national logics. Sarah Beck, on the other hand, was interested in Obama Hope’s participation in the same sex marriage debate that was happening during Obama’s first presidential campaign and term. With previous interests in queer rhetoric, Beck thus married queer theory and rhetorical theory with archival research methods to trace Obama Hope’s fluctuating involvement in the cultural and legislative movement around same sex marriage alongside Obama’s shifting stances. In both these cases, then, specific questions about Obama Hope in relation to race and LGBT issues drove scholars to adapt already existing methodologies and methods for their distinct research needs.

As evident in the response interviews, DVS scholars are increasingly turning to methodologies and methods for their ability to open up different ways of experiencing an artifact. For instance, as Edrington and Gallagher explain, in terms of The Virtual MLK Project, their team wanted to prioritize sound as a mode through which one could experience Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Creative Protest” speech, which was initially delivered at White Rock Baptist Church in 1960 and later printed in a pamphlet. Museums, they note, typically privilege the visual, and they wanted to explore how sound, as a mode, might supplement the visual to help facilitate a transformative experience for visitors who were not present during King’s initial address. Thus, in addition to deploying Gallon’s technology as recovery as a governing methodological framework, they also chose, as a framework, “public address as experience, a conceptualization which foregrounds rhetoric’s materiality” (“Public”). And in terms of method, they focused on generating a collective sound experience to “immerse listeners into a moment in history, providing a sense of how and to what extent an experience of public address is a fully embodied experience” (“Collective”). So, what we learn here is that when it comes to DVS, methodologies and methods are also commonly chosen to open up different kinds of embodied experiences with artifacts to foster deeper understanding of them than print media might afford.

As also evident above, methods and methodologies are also often chosen in DVS because of the opportunities they open up to (re)present and experience a particular historical event. Pettiway, for instance, speaks to the desire to make visible and audible stories from contributors to the Civil Rights movement that too often go unacknowledged. In his work with The Virtual MLK Project, he and team members thus extended Aja Martinez’s work with counterstories to use an approach he calls counterdesign. As Martinez explains in her 2020 award-winning book, counterstory is “a methodology that functions through methods that empower the minoritized through the formation of stories that disrupt the erasures embdedded in standardized majoritarian methodologies” (3). With counterdesign, then, Pettiway and team worked hard to create space for people across generations, especially young folks, to share their publicly unacknowledged, but all too important, contributions to civil rights activism. Rhodes, on the other hand, was originally going to write a book about the Furies, and then realized that using a queer feminist approach to produce a documentary film might open different possibilities for storytelling, especially making it possible for audience members to learn about 1970s lesbian separatist activism by actually seeing and hearing directly from some of the Furies who are still alive. More and more, then, we find DVS scholars turning to methodologies and methods because of their ability to expand opportunities to not only tell historical stories and counterstories but also to experience history through inventional ways that harness the affordances of not only the visual but other senses as well.

Sometimes methodologies and methods are also chosen because of a specific onto-political imperative. For many DVS scholars, for instance, accessibility for all is a crucial methodological imperative. By accessibility, to be clear, I am thinking of it here not only in terms of the ability to physically and cognitively interact with DVS projects, but also the ability to make use of them for one’s own rhetorical purposes. As Dolmage turns in his response to disability and rhetorical studies to convey, accessibility must not be an afterthought in doing DVS; instead, it must move to the forefront of concern through all phases of the research and design process. Indeed, Pettiway and Edrington and Gallagher argue persuasively that when doing DVS with community, we especially need to make sure that the design technologies are accessible to participants from the inception of the project while the presentation technologies must adapt to specific community needs. In one sense, then, as Edrington notes, DVS scholars must continually ask who will have access to our DVS projects and how will they access them. But Pettiway goes even further, asking “What if we invite other community members to actually be designers?” He reminds us that due to issues of both class and race, the digital technologies we tend to use often preclude community members from being able to fully participate. As DVS scholars move forward with more community engaged projects, then, DVS scholars are thus often choosing specific methodologies and methods for their abilities to generate interactive participation for all.

Other imperatives inspire many DVS scholars to turn to Black Studies and Decolonial Studies for engaging with specific methodologies and methods. For instance, one imperative is evident in Pettiway’s call for DVS to integrate Kim Gallon’s seven tenets for doing the Black Digital Humanities, and specifically taking a technology of recovery approach. As Gallon explains in “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” recovery is a scholarly tradition at the heart of Black Studies that “seeks to restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization” (n.p.). As explicated so clearly by Pettiway, recovery is not just about collectively recuperating that which has been forgotten, but also that which has systematically, legally, and extra-legally been stolen. In addition, as Pettiway also notes, these tenets help to remind DVS scholars that digital visual technologies are not exempt from issues of race and racism. The take away here is for DVS scholars is to adopt methodologies that can help us develop a muscle memory that always pushes us to ask how technologies and platforms and practices and deliverables may be, even if unintentionally, a host for racism and thus complicit in ongoing legacies of dehumanization.

For Baca and Garcia, scholars also need to acknowledge our complicity in coloniality and consider how DVS might be enacted from a decolonial perspective and through epistemic disobedience, so that more diverse projects are taken up “that do not comply nor seek compliance with dominant and dominating structures of power” (see Baca’s response). Coloniality, here, as Garcia and Baca presses us to consider, does not refer to a past event but to ongoing systems of oppression that often are upheld through sociologics of exclusion. As Baca notes, not near enough attention has been given to DVS projects that generate access to and explore Indigenous cultural practices and ways of knowing. The “The Pop-Up Botanica: Enduring Indigenous Knowledges,” which he is working on with colleagues and students at his home university as well as Pascua Yaqui and Chicanx elders and traditional healers, is a model for how DVS can help make visible Mesoamerican meaning making practices that too often go unacknowledged. For Baca, then, the choice to embrace decolonial, pluriversal methodologies is important for helping to center Indigenous knowledges, practices, and agencies in archival and digital visual activities. I believe such methodological imperatives can be crucial to DVS in that they especially help open up opportunities to ask, in Garcia’s terms, “while coloniality is our present, how do we participate in everyday human projects of being, seeing, and doing in the world that will contribute to it not being part of our future?” As Garcia further notes, figuring out how to participate otherwise may situate DVS scholars in the unknowable, but he presses us to heed this methodological imperative anyway in order to harness the work and hope that decolonial options in DVS not only call forth but demand.

For DVS scholars interested in social change, choice of methodology and method also often emerges due to curiosities about the affordances of technological innovation for civic engagement. Too often in visual studies, as I have argued elsewhere (2018), we perceive ourselves to be researchers of other’s rhetorical interventions into civic affairs. In doing so we miss important opportunities to make our own visual research intervene in public matters. Civic engagement requires rhetorical entanglement, a process that emerges only when our own scholarly productions have the opportunity to intermingle with other circulating discourses. Digital visual research-creations have the ability to develop not just new theories but also new civic interventions. Modeling as such, for his chapter, Jacob Greene embraced rhetorical theory and set out to discover how digital platforms could be used to both analyze and produce civic rhetoric. Method wise, Greene specifically chose to explore how AR can function to both analyze and produce counterpublic remixes of widely circulated public images. However, Greene challenges us to explore other means of digital visual production to help put our own visual interventions into public circulation.

This choice aligns, in many ways, with interventional DVS projects that came up during conversation in the response interviews. If readers recall, I discuss how Kelly Wheeler and I have been taking a new materialist rhetorical approach to map out how circulating swastikas manifested in and impacted many peoples and communities in the U.S. during the Trump administration. Whitebear, on the other hand, turns to what she calls counter colonial storytelling to work alongside other Indigenous women to help figure out what kind of digital map they could co-produce to help address the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In Risam’s case, she and her colleagues engage in what they call epistemic action to rapidly developed a map, with an accompanying website, that could intervene in the immigration detention center crisis. Such critical cartography projects come with their own ethical dilemmas, of course. In her response interview, for example, Risam discusses how her team had to carefully weigh how much data to share publicly without putting children and their families in even more harms way. Yet, overall, these DVS scholars push us to understand that the methods and methodologies to which we often turn are chosen because of their interventional affordances, in this case their abilities to actually help address emerging and ongoing exigent social issues.

In addition to their value for public intervention, methodological choice in digital visual studies also derives from curiosity about the potential of experimental methodologies and methods to impact disciplinary knowledge and practice. What can, say, critical-making or glitching teach us about a specific visual artifact that, in turn, enriches visual studies at large? Taking such methodological route is perhaps the most difficult of all in that it requires total immersion with emerging design techniques, experimentation with unpredictable results, and deep methodological reflection to discover and identify a nascent practice’s possible contribution to digital visual studies. It also tends to get messy, in the words of Rhodes, due to their risky and exploratory undertakings. But as scholars in this collection demonstrate, such hard work can reap insightful rewards. Shannon Butts, for example, discovered through her own critical making of Obama Hope that 3D printing can “decenter normative ways of seeing in favor of diverse lived experiences.” Prioritizing difference and possibility via critical making approaches, she argues, can, in turn, push people to ask different questions about the visual, experiment with novel ideas, and better understand how our diverse senses shape interpretive experiences. Kira (Kyle) Bohunicky’s experimental play with glitching, on the other hand, models how the positive reframing of unintended consequences can lead to new directions for research that “formal analyses might be unable or even hesitant to address.” As they argue, such opening especially has potential to arise when we engage with methods that enable us to enter into a co-constitutive relationship with digital technologies in which we act as collaborative agents in creative-critical, rhetorical play.

Interestingly, while such disciplinary promises of new research possibilities may guide one’s research choices, sometimes methodological choice and innovation stems from more general questions about a phenomenon that presents a particular research dilemma. For instance, my initial questions for Still Life with Rhetoric were: how do visual-material artifacts become rhetorical within time and space? How do images actually go viral? And what methodologies and methods are at our disposal to do such research? I chose the Obama Hope image because I knew it would afford the opportunity to address these larger questions. This choice proved to be highly fruitful, exceeding my anticipations and expectations for both broad and in-depth research. But in actuality, my methodological choice of a new materialist approach derived from questions about rhetorical transformation and viral circulation while the invention of iconographic tracking derived from the lack of an explicit method at my disposal to find answers to such questions. Similarly, in this collection, Harry Archer and Emma Collins drew on the methodology of geosemiotics to invent a method they call virtual geosemiotics because they were interested in questions about context-depending meanings of images that circulate in different visual ecologies. They also wanted to know how they could identify the local meanings that images take on when researchers do not have the means to perform in situ research in a location to which they do not have physical access. Interestingly, Singh too discusses a similar problem in her interview response, in that she was interested in better understanding how advertising icons come to play an important role in the visual politics at work in India, but lacked a reliable approach for tracing them on the streets of India from afar. She articulates how virtual geosemiotics (and social media archiving actually) might have helped her negotiate what turned out for her to be a very messy research process. The lesson learned here, then, is that choice of methodology and invention of method is often driven not just by a specific artifact of interest but by broad phenomenological questions with uneasy research solutions.

In this day and age especially, methodological choice is especially driven by research dilemmas that stem from the problems of technological innovation. As Blake Hallinan’s driving question makes clear, visual research dilemmas often arise as software and websites emerge and disappear: “If sites that are responsible for producing, storing, and circulating digitally-born artifacts that make a lasting impact on culture(s) disappear [and thus] scholars lose important primary sources that document an image’s historicity,” how can scholars adequately recover how images become significant players in the public sphere? Aaron Beveridge and Nicholas Van Horn, similarly, tackle problems associated with the loss of access to data. We can’t, they remind us, visualize or understand a history or dataset that we cannot access—or that could be deleted or lost if the data isn’t preserved. In order to address these technological-driven dilemmas, then, Hallinan turns to digital media archeology while Beveridge and Van Horn turn to macroscopic methodologies. Interestingly, for Beveridge and Van Horn, this has meant not only rethinking the methods and methodologies that drive their research activity, but also inventing the software to data science research. Like Ryan Omizo and Bill Hart-Davidson’s Hedge-O-Matic software, where rhetorical scholarship and software development are closely aligned, Beveridge and Van Horn thus produced MassMine, an open source research software designed to address issues of access, which they used to conduct research on Obama Hope tweets.

Finally, but certainly not least important, Beveridge has also reminded me in multiple conversations throughout the production of this collection that our answer as to how to decide which methodology is best or most appropriate—as well as whether to rely on traditional methods or invent anew even in the face of failure—also depends on the changing nature of the networks and technologies that define the space delimited as “digital.” For example, in 2009, when Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss published “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery,” they were helping to lay the groundwork for methodologies invested in viral media and remix culture, where the circulation model for many digital networks was based on user-sharing, weak ties, and reverse-chronological distributions of digital artifacts. Yet, that same year, Facebook replaced users’ reverse-chronological newsfeeds with algorithmically filtered content, and by 2016 this became the default circulation model for many of the largest social networks—like Twitter and Instagram. This fundamental shift in how digital media are delivered and circulated has methodological consequences that we are just beginning to understand. For example, at the end of Still Life with Rhetoric, which was published in 2015, I explain that one of the contributing reasons for visual things “going viral” is the designer/author utilizing “distribution strategies [that] make a thing easily accessible to a mass audience” (285). Like Ridolfo and DeVoss, these strategies focus largely on composing, design, production, and remix methods that maximize an artifact’s contagious potential—its mobility and likelihood of generating large-scale affective responses within and across multiple networks. While these strategies remain nonetheless vital for digital composers, and should not be given any less credence in digital visual studies, Beveridge argues that their analytical value in understanding why something has “gone viral” has less relevance today than we may surmise. Today, while composition and distribution are still highly important, chances for broad circulation have more to do with how well the designer/author has aligned the delivery of their artifact with an algorithm’s underlying processes for calculating an artifact’s relevance for other users in the network. In other words, Beveridge insists, the move away from a reverse-chronological circulation model requires that we change the way we study the digital artifacts that circulate within digital networks. The very nature of how things move and circulate within digital networks has changed—replacing contagion effects with network effects that are driven by the attendant data that influence the filters and algorithms that now control what users see within digital networks.

In light of such changes in technological infrastructure, scholars doing digital visual studies will thus likely be pressured to keep inventing methods anew to keep up with how digital visual artifacts impact and interface with culture. In recognition that methodological tradition as well as reflection are important, then, I propose methodological diffraction as we move forward with digital visual studies. I am thinking here of Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology and her call to “disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical metaphor—namely, reflection—that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between separate entities.” As Barad explains, “diffraction” is not concerned with “homologies but attends to specific material entanglements” (88) in order to discover how apparatus and our own participation in various enactments make a difference in research findings.

The problem with specific material entanglements—whether digital or physical or (more likely) something in between—is that they are under no obligation to conform to our preferred methodologies and methods for investigating their consequentiality. For example, as mentioned above, many circulation studies scholars of new media still often assume the early design of social networks (~2008–2015) in which reverse-chronologies of user-generated content magnify the viral potential of grassroots movements and the networking capacity of remix culture—the humanities saw immense promise in the democratic possibilities emerging from this circulation model. However, as Beveridge notes, that model has been replaced in many digital networks by data-driven technologies that distribute content based on black boxed statistical calculations of “engagement” or “relevance” for groups of users. In other words, again, this fundamental techno-cultural change requires that we both recognize how shifting socio-technological apparatus impact the entanglement under study and adjust our tools, methods, and methodologies to better understand their effects/affects on not only the delivery, circulation, and consequentiality of visual artifacts but also the knowledge we produce about them.

If we are to remain truly open to finding the best answers to difficult methodological choices, then, Beveridge reminds us that our choices must be located less in disciplinary pronouncements and in entrenched protections for established theories and methods than in paying close attention to the changing nature of digital networks. This may be an unsatisfying answer to the question that frames this afterword, but when scholars remain too devoted to long-standing methodologies and methods, they risk failing to invent new methods and/or heavily adapt previous methods that can better help them visualize the changing nature of visual data at play in digital networks. If anything, when it comes to digital visual research, “playing it safe” with one’s methodological choices may be riskier than attempting to forge new ways of doing digital visual studies.

To Sum it all Up

As I have tried to make transparent throughout this collection, the main call to action in Doing Digital Visual Studies is to inspire more inventive play and to encourage scholars to diversify digital visual studies through expanded participation and more intensification of experimental risk taking. The contributions to the first part of the collection highlight the potential of embracing experimentation and play in the face of failure to open up new possibilities of knowledge production and public intervention. It is through such experimentations that DVS and its working assumptions, as articulated in the introduction, were first imagined, and it is through such experimentations, I hope, that DVS will continue to grow both as a process-based scholarship and an intellectual enterprise.

The response interviews in the second part of the collection highlight how as DVS grows, more work can be done to center and attend to diverse cultural perspectives, voices, issues, experiences and practices that too often go neglected. As we hope this collection impresses upon readers, the creative and constructive affordances of such diversification can especially be harnessed when collaboration unfolds among diverse team members, each of whom bring their unique perspectives, experiences, ideas, and skills to the work. I have long supported the notion of doing DVS for interventional purposes and enacting social change. But I am especially taken with the imperatives to not only put to work Gallon’s principles of the Black digital humanities and tenets of recovery in DVS but also to take up coloniality as a central analytic. Borrowing from Baca’s response here, such imperatives, I believe, can help manifest hopes, visions, and possibilities for confronting racist and colonial entanglements from which DVS is not divorced. In addition, I am taken with the idea to exert more efforts to do DVS with community members in order to co-identify exigent issues and to co-generate DVS projects with potential to address those issues and give something significant back to that community. In doing so, DVS must be careful to think through the ethics and practices of accessibility, exploring ways to make possible more participation through choice of technology, practice, production, and presentation. Too, DVS scholars must think more carefully about data itself, recognizing that the affordances of open access are not too be harnessed without careful consideration of permissibility, sovereignty, and consequentiality. And, of course, DVS scholars must think through the perspectives through which we come to their various projects, taking care to check our colonial and neocolonial impulses that lead to specific interpretations and actions and getting disobedient, if necessary, to imagine this work otherwise.

I also encourage scholars to pay close attention to specific material entanglements of digital networks—to, as Barad says, meet them halfway—and to test a diverse range of methods and methodologies in studying those material specificities and emerging technologies. When it comes to digital visual research—where the nature(s) of digital environments often change more quickly than we can make sense of them—our choices must be more directly connected to the programs, systems, algorithms, and business models that drive the development and the daily operation of digital networks. This is especially imperative because the complex reciprocity between technological change and cultural change will only continue to produce techno-cultural shifts that challenge our desire to establish and extend methodological norms for digital visual studies. The methods and methodologies forwarded in this collection could, for example, become obsolete within 5 years. In fact, they may already be outdated by the time you are reading this collection. If anything has proved true of digital networks, it is a fool’s errand to try to predict how such complex posthuman systems/technologies will change over time. Therefore, as digital visual culture is always-evolving, we cannot help but embrace methodological adaption, experimentation, and invention.

While such methodological evolution is not without risk, I believe this to be one of the most exciting and wonderful aspects of the work we do—especially as digital visual studies scholars. I thus encourage scholars both new and old to DVS to diversify the critical perspectives and interactions through which they do DVS and to lead and/or join collective projects that put social justice at the forefront of digital visual studies. I also encourage scholars to get closer to the metal, to pay close attention to newly emerging cultural situations and material specificities, and to let their methodological choices be sparked by their own creativity, commitments, and desire in response to constantly shifting socio-cultural and techno-cultural change. This does not mean that we should forget our disciplinary histories, traditions, and methodological trajectories—these no doubt remain influential on our choices—but they should not carry so much inertia that they keep us from seeing and studying the changing nature of digital visual culture and visual digital media nor imagining ways to do this work otherwise. Take a chance, get messy, and get disobedient—it’s probably less risky than playing it safe.

Works Cited

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