Interlude:

Interruptions into Digital Visual Studies

By Laurie E. Gries

I want to begin this interlude with an expression of gratitude. Initially, the idea for this collection came to me in the middle of the night after my graduate class titled Visual Rhetoric and Methodologies at the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2016. I had intended to write a full rhetorical biography of the Obama Hope image as a second monograph, but what if, I wondered, different scholars came to Obama Hope through a wide range of methods and methodologies? What more could we learn about Obama Hope and visual studies at large through a collective digital research project?

Rather than immediately put out a national call for this collection, I began talking with students in my graduate course in Communication at CU Boulder to explore what a digital book project might entail. We decided to spend the rest of the semester brainstorming the design of the collection, some of the content of which could be produced for their final seminar projects. I also reached out to past students of mine from English at the University of Florida who I knew were undertaking compelling and innovative work with visual research. With students doing work with 3D printing, digital archiving, data science, augmented reality, media archaeology, and geosemiotics—I felt fortunate to have worked with so many inventive graduate students and felt confident their research could help expand the possibilities for digital visual studies. Their contributions to the collection would certainly not be easy; it required, after all, that contributors channel their own scholarly interests and investments toward a single object of study that they were not necessarily interested in. On the other hand, this digital project afforded each contributor the opportunity to experiment and play, to invent and take risks, and to push the boundaries. In talking with potential authors about this collection, then, I simply asked that they propose a chapter that would not only deepen our knowledge of the Obama Hope image but, even more importantly, make an explicit methodological contribution to digital visual studies. What can you adapt or invent, I asked, that would model methodological innovation in action, that has potential to move digital visual studies forward in meaningful, productive directions? I remain grateful that this question and project attracted the contributing authors' attention and appealed to their widespread interests.

Due to the contributing authors’ varying ideas and goals, this collection has resulted in a broad range of methodological projects that each has potential to move digital visual studies forward in productive ways. Undoubtedly, of course, and as identified in the introduction, this collection is limited. I recognize especially how the contributing authors of this collection lack racial diversity. Other white editors and scholars in the field such as myself must do better collaborating with scholars of color to do digital visual studies as well as levering our white privilege to open up spaces for their own visions and work. In no uncertain terms, digital visual studies will benefit as more diverse bodies make more unique methodological contributions, drawing on their own perspectives, commitments, and desires to both analyze and produce visual rhetorics with potential to impact academic and public affairs. I appreciate, as just a few examples, how Kim Gallon has worked with scholars across the country to develop Covid Black—a public humanities project that aims to “tell empowering stories about Black life that address racial health disparities” and how Luhui Whitebear has worked with Indigenous women to visualize the disconnect between federal and grassroots efforts to address the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. In addition, I admire how Manan Ahmed et al. pulled their collective energy to generate “Torn Apart/Separados,” a public digital humanities project that uses data visualizations to map out Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy in 2018 and more generally mass incarceration in the U.S. I especially value this body of work’s priorities to put Black and indigenous frameworks, strategic rhetorical data practices, and racial injustice at the center of digital visual studies, and I call on DVS scholars to ask: What other digital visual practices enacted in underrepresented culturally-specific contexts need to be recovered and what other public facing projects can be developed to expose and confront contemporary issues of injustice?

I would especially love to see scholars interested in digital visual studies forming diverse collectives to develop lab spaces to further explore how digital visual studies can unify research, advocacy, and activism to work for social change. The epistemic cluster of Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research at Columbia University is one such example. With such inventive spaces, it is especially vital for such labs to decenter whiteness, working under the leadership of BIPOC scholars to do the digital visual studies work they feel needs to be done. Yet, doing such work from a critical Black digital humanities perspective, should not ensue without critical attention to the ways in which digital visual studies, like the digital humanities, is complicit in ongoing racisms by, as just a few examples, using tools that are not equally accessible, delimiting possibilities for input in terms of design, content, and presentation, and supporting technological advancements that lead to environmental problems that impact minoritized communities disproportionately. In this latter regard, as Safiya Umoja Noble argues, “the landscape of information and communication technology, including the tools used in DH projects [and I would add DVS projects], are fully implicated in racialized violence and environmental destruction; from extraction to production, and from consumption to disposal of digital technologies” (31). The challenge here, then, is to develop collective spaces for DVS projects that work for social change while simultaneously interrogating how such work “perpetuates uneven distribution of information technology resources, how it sustains cultural centers that are implicated in the suppression of Black life diasporically, and how it often works in a neoliberal fashion to obscure important features of the social, political, and economic landscape” (32). While this collection has only offered a handful of experimental digital visual methodologies and methods that have yet to live up to such visions, I hope that our collection and this call to action will inspire more DVS projects that blend methodological diversity with inventive play and critical interrogation to generate constructive efforts of public intervention that help to address the complicated webs of racial injustice, environmental destruction, and economic and social disenfranchisement.

In light of such call, I also, and especially, want to advocate for scholars to think more deeply about how digital visual studies might be enacted moving forward if critical race, queer, disability studies, Indigenous, decolonial, and postcolonial perspectives were made central to this area of study. In this collection, thus far, we certainly see some of these lenses at work, but much more can be done to better ensure that critical perspectives are informing digital visual studies all the way through the research and writing process—from inception of research question to choice of digital technologies and platforms to design of method and presentation of data to production, publication, and distribution. For this reason, the next part of this collection presents diverse perspectives and ideas coming from a body of outstanding scholars that include: Damián Baca, Jay Dolmage, Candice Edrington, Vicki Gallagher, Romeo García, Keon Pettiway, Jacqueline Rhodes, Roopika Risam, Rohini Singh, and Luhui Whitebear. Whether speaking to the importance of (re)imagining accessibility, decolonizing data, enacting counterdesign, queering digital visual studies, or, among other ideas, confronting coloniality in DVS—each contributing respondent makes a unique suggestion for doing digital visual studies, and together, as whole, this work pushes readers to think deeply about how digital visual studies can work harder to contribute to social change, public knowledge, and/or the communities in which we interact.

These voices and responses are vital to this collection in that they inspire a felt responsibility and accountability that many such as myself have much to learn from. These pieces, for example, push DVS scholars to ask a variety of important questions, just a few of which I identify here:

• How can DVS scholars interrogate the widely accepted notion of open data, keeping in mind that not all people and communities want open access to their communty’s data (see Risam and Whitebear)?

• How can DVS scholars think about community from the ground up—working with various community stakeholders to identify pressing research questions, design DVS projects in ways that make it possible for community members to participate and interact, and produce DVS projects that give back to that community in meaningful ways (see Pettiway, Risam, Whitebear, and Edrington and Gallagher)?

• How can DVS scholars think about accessibility from early stages of the research process to the last stages of digital production, realizing that such move is as much about equitable access as it is constructive rhetorical practice? (see Dolmage, Pettiway, and Edrington and Gallagher)?

• How can DVS scholars embrace risk taking, radical play and counterdesign to enrich the affective experience of audience members, even at the risk of messiness, uncertainty, and unpredictability (see Rhodes, Pettiway, Risam, and Eddington and Gallagher)?

• How can DVS scholars acknowledge their complicity in ongoing centrisms and oppressions, avoid neocolonial perspectives, and engage in decolonial thinking and doing in order to do DVS otherwise (see Singh, García, and Baca)?

In addressing such questions, the response interviews are crucially important for thinking through the ethical complexities and responsibilities of doing DVS. For instance, in my eyes, some of the big takeaways from the responses are that DVS must be careful to think through the ethics and practices of accessibility, exploring ways from the ground up 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. Especially important too is checking the perspectives through which we study and interpret visual phenomena. When we study visual phenomena from cultures not our own, Singh pushes us to consider for instance, how we might consider visuality from that culture perspective while Baca suggests for DVS scholars to check the colonizing impulses that may arise for many and to find ways to make visible that culture’s epistemologies, values, and principles.

In addition to ethical issues, the responses also raise some very inspiring conversations about how to build DVS with community. In so many interviews—from Risam to Whitebear to Pettiway to Edrington and Gallagher to Garcia—the respondents push DVS scholars to realize the creative and constructive affordances of collaborating with community members to co-identify exigent issues and to co-generate DVS projects with potential to contribute something significant back to that community. Such work, I have become convinced through these interviews, is important because in one sense, as Garcia notes, we ourselves are an accumulation of the “literacies, images, and rhetorics of our communities.” Yet, he also draws on Fanon to note how building community through DVS, can help do the work of healing and the work of being answerable to others. Such efforts have potential to especially come to fruition when we ask, as Risam suggests, what communities need and want and how DVS scholarship can help meet those needs by working with, and in guidance from the community, through the entire research, design, and production processes. And yet, such working with is not just for the benefits of that community but also in “the non-name of all” (Acosta 241). As Garcia puts it so eloquently, “Doing carries the promise of making community otherwise” and his and other responses challenge DVS to seriously invest in that endeavor.

Thus far, I have only touched upon a few of many such rich insights offered by respondents, but for the sake of highlighting the response interviews, let me just quickly touch upon two additional significant contributions the respondents make to this collection and the future of DVS research. First, are the very useful dives into the hows of actually doing DVS research. Pettiway, for instance, speaks into very specific ways that DVS scholars can integrate the principles of the black digital humanities and specifically the tenets of recovery forwarded by Gallon and to get creative and constructive with counterdesign. (Note: To learn about Gallon’s seven tenets of recovery, watch this video in which Pettiway clearly distills the tenets.) Edrington and Gallagher account for specific ways to not only work with community to generate meaningful DVS projects but how to make sure that everyone involved receives their fair sure of accreditation. And Risam details how teams can assembled and divide labor to rapidly generate critical data interventions into pressing social crises while Whitebear discusses ways to engage with Indigenous communities to do DVS work that functions as both scholarship and activism. This how-to knowledge is especially valuable in that, as I note in one of the interviews, DVS scholars are often not well trained to do non-traditional digital visual studies nor do intensely collaborative team work. Through interaction with all the response interviews, I believe DVS scholars will walk away from this collection with many specific and inventive ways to move forward with their own and others’ DVS projects.

I also find that the respondents speak poignantly into the whys of doing DVS research. I am particularly struck by the notion of doing DVS not so much to persuade or convince or argue, but rather to generate experiences of various sorts. Pettiway, for instance, speaks to the notion of using DVS to bring out intergenerational experiences of civil rights history while Edrington and Gallagher speak to the power of creating multi-sensory virtual experiences that generate possibilities for transformation. Rhodes too speaks to the importance of embodied experience, urging DVS scholars to think about how we might measure rhetorical success by asking: “Does it make you feel? Does it make you connect? Does it make you identify?” Especially in an age of disconnection brought on by a global pandemic and perhaps to be exacerbated by the ensuing metaverse, how, Rhodes asks, can DVS work harder to cultivate and inspire embodied connection.

In light of such and many other constructive insights, I encourage readers to critically engage with all of the interview responses. Most come in the form of Zoom recordings that unfold more as sustained discussions between the respondents and myself than official interviews. Others you will see are question and answer type written responses intended to get at many of the same questions I posed in the video discussions. My hope with all of these is to help move DVS continue to move in constructive directions toward an unrealized yet intensely meaningful, and dare I say, just academic practice.

To view, listen to, and/or read these significant contributions to this collection, please simply click on each response card.

Works Cited

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