In giving name to digital visual studies, we do not aim to introduce a new area of research per se. But we do hope to underscore the potentiality of digital visual research that is emerging across the humanities and to which we hope to contribute. We are excited, for instance, about Edgar Gómez Cruz, Shanti Sumartojo, and Sarah Pink’s published collection Reconfiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research.2 In this collection, scholars from across the humanities explore how digital visual technologies, such as drone cameras, Go-Pro cameras, eye-tracking technologies, and 360 degrees cameras, are helping to invent new research techniques for ethnographic research—research that we believe scholars interested in rhetorical field methods will particularly find useful. We aim to extend such digital visual research by exploring how digital research operating at the nexus of visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and the digital humanities can be as equally productive, particularly for research in RC/WS and Communication.
We envision ourselves working at the nexus of visual rhetoric and communication, digital rhetoric, and the digital humanities because, most simply, we share similar interests with and our research is most directly informed by each of these fields of study.3 With visual rhetoric and communication, for instance, we share an interest in the relations between visual phenomena and public life—most particularly how the design, production, distribution, and circulation of visual artifacts enable rhetorics of resistance, collective identification, participatory action, and civic engagement. We are inspired, for instance, by the work of Candice L. Edrington and Victoria J. Gallagher who examine the role of photography in the Black Lives Matter movement and remind us to pay close attention to the important role visual rhetoric and social media can play in both perpetuating and addressing racial inequities. As they note, visual media and digital technologies certainly can and do perpetuate negative depictions that contribute to systemic oppression; however, still photographs and videos circulated via social media also play a vital role in “broadening audience awareness of instances of racial inequality…” and providing mechanisms for that audience to “join the public discourse on the matters at hand,” help shift narratives about social movements, and make visible perceptions and experiences of African American citizens and others that often go unseen are articulated (2). We also appreciate how E. Cram, Melanie Loehwing, and John Louis Lucaites push us to consider how digital photography is transforming civic engagement in ways that necessitate rethinking the relations not only between digital photography and analog photography but also between digital photography and our own roles as civic actors. As they build on the work of Richard Lanham to point out, in an era of digital culture, we no longer, if we ever did, look at and through photographs but rather with them—a multiplying perspective that enables “a new kind of civic practice that upends the traditional separation between those who act and those who see, making it possible for acts of seeing to fulfill the political functions of both rhetor and audience.” In addition to recognizing and being committed to investigating the important role digital visual media play in contemporary race relations, digital visual studies recognizes such transformation in civic practice and participatory culture and aims to delve more deeply into how emergent digital technologies and new media practices are fueling this transformation in significant ways.
We are especially invested in exploring how social media, software programs, mobile devices, digital applications, and digital machines are shifting the ways we interact with visual media and what the implications of such shifts are for individual and collective life. We thus also share a strong focus with digital rhetoric, which as a field of study is concerned with the analysis, production, and circulation of a wide range of digital artifacts, genres, and practices, including new media images. In enculturation’s special issue devoted to digital rhetorics, for instance, Angela J. Aguayo explores how digital media production opens up opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of agency, vernacular discourse, and rhetorical practice. As Aguayo explains so succinctly, processes of digitalization, which afford the conversion of information such as text, sound, image, or voice into a single binary code, make easy the creation, remix, and sharing of media content in various genres such as documentary film, GIFS, iconic digital photographs, etc. While certainly such affordances help to circulate official, commercial, industry discourse, Aguayo notes that they also make possible the wide distribution of “vernacular forms of communication, stories through the eyes of the common people rather than the politically privileged, economic elites, or media professionals who typically control the spin on public content” (n.p). We appreciate how Aguayo’s own work with the Rural Civil Rights Project (RCRP) has been designed as a “form of communicative agency” that “functions as the kinetic energy of rhetorical performance (Miller), set in motion by media practice, organizing publics together through collaboration, and circulating discourse through multiple platforms to assert influence and change” (n.p.). Similarly, we are interested in how DVS projects can acquire such agency as they seek and function to make visible and audible vernacular voices, practices, and experiences that too often go unseen and heard.
In this same special issue, we also appreciate how digital rhetoric scholars also lead to affective phenomena that saturate everyday life. In his essay, for instance, Jeff Rice explores how the digital aggregation of images, headlines, tweets, etc. leads to phenomena such as “digital rage” that takes place in social media environments. “Digital aggregation,” he explains, “foregrounds already held beliefs by computating them within a current, circulated image” such as the photograph of Cecil—the Zimbabwe lion killed in 2015 by a Minnesota dentist on an African safari hunt. Such aggregations may develop via personal experiences, but in many cases, they are generated via news and popular culture, in this case for example, movies such as The Lion King or Born Free that create certain narratives about lions that we internalize. Such aggregations have always existed,” Rice notes, “but digital circulation and social media interactions make them extremely powerful today as technical images.” As scholars interested in digital visual studies, we work toward similar aims, identifying how digitally produced images in conjunction with social media and other digital technologies spread affect, trigger collective identification, alter ways of seeing and understanding, and in some cases, as Rice notes, exacerbate already-existing human emotions, logics, and behaviors as well as cultural phenomena.
Just as the US presidential transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump has influenced the trajectory of Obama Hope—a trajectory that Gries and Bratta explore in their chapter for this collection—so too has this transition revealed new and troubling challenges regarding the changing nature of digital rhetoric. As Aaron Beveridge explains in “Writing through Big Data: New Challenges and Possibilities for Data-Driven Arguments,” social networks have been transitioning away from user-generated peer-to-peer experiences that are truly social in nature and have returned to a centralized “broadcast” model where the circulation of digital artifacts is tightly controlled by filtering programs and algorithms (see also Smith and Brown). As such, Beveridge asks and responds: “Who (or what) controls the broadcast? Who controls what users see in the network? As advertising and shareholder value take precedence over peer-to-peer sharing, the ‘Power to Organize’ in many digital networks has been greatly reduced.” While these changes present many new challenges for digital rhetoricians, they are exacerbated by the ways in which filtering programs and social network algorithms can be manipulated by bots, click farms, trolls, and misinformation campaigns. In recent interviews, Jack Dorsey—founder and CEO of Twitter—admitted that content moderation “does not scale” for global networks (Dorsey), and that it may be time to fundamentally rethink the design of social networks (HA). We believe that digital rhetoric—and digital visual studies in particular—is well positioned to utilize our unique constellation of methodologies in helping to redesign and rethink the ways that digital artifacts are distributed and visualized (trends, feeds, content moderation/aggregation) for users of social networks (see Beveridge and Van Horn chapter in this collection).
In addition, alongside visual and digital rhetoric, we value the move in the digital humanities to experiment with various computational tools to do history. We value inventive strategies that make use of digital technologies, platforms, and practices that open up different ways to collect and curate images—whether that entails developing new apps ourselves or tinkering with software that has already been developed but perhaps (re)imagined for other purposes. We especially value exploring ways of doing digital visual history that make visible and audible underrepresented voices and stories. We agree with scholars such as Siobhan Senier (2014) who have called out the failure of many digital archival projects to intervene in ongoing oppressions, and we take note that many highly visible and well-funded digital archives neglect artifacts and collections that are representative of, much less, generated by, minoritized peoples and communities. We are invested in exploring how informal archives produced via social media can disrupt such tendencies and simultaneously open up opportunities for addressing inquiries and matters of concern considered significant for minoritized peoples and communities.
We also are interested in more formal collaborative history making—how scholars can work alongside others within and beyond the academy to build accessible archives, especially ones that open up multiple opportunities for experience. We admire, for instance, the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project led by Vicki Gallagher, Keon Pettiway, Derek Ham and their multifaceted team, especially how it experiments with virtual reality and harnesses the affordances of diverse digital technologies to not only help visitors have a multisensory experience to better imagine what it would have been like to see, hear, and feel MLK Jr.’s influential speech, “A Creative Protest,” but also open different opportunities for response. We believe such work models how digital visual studies can contribute to rhetorical history not only in unique, creative, and inventive ways but also transformative ways—especially for minoritized peoples and communities who too often are neglected in digital-historical projects. As transgender activist Reina Gossett and Michelle Caswell teach us, “connection to the past can be a survival strategy that enables people to counter feelings of erasure and isolation” (5). Digital visual studies is thus committed to inventing tools, methods, and practices that can help make possible such counter rhetorical-historical work.
In prioritizing experimenting and making, we also take inspiration from the digital humanities’ contribution to what David Staley (2017) calls “the ‘maker turn’ in the humanities.” As Staley notes, one of the contributions that digital humanists make to the humanities, at large, is the fashioning and tracing of new forms of evidence to address critical inquiries (32). Whether one is thinking about mapping, wordclouds, or 3D printing, “The screen,” as he notes, “expands the possibilities for how humanists demonstrate evidence and proves especially valuable as a space for visual representations and visualizations. The screen also affords new options for what humanists can make, beyond what is possible with print” (34). We thus take seriously the potential affordances of the screen to experiment with different ways of collecting, organizing, and analyzing visual data.
We also are inspired by digital projects that speculate about and experiment with interaction as a productive means of knowledge production, even at the risk of failure. We thus take inspiration from projects such as Sean Morey’s “Deepwater Horizon Roadkill Tollbooth (A MEmorial)” which offers a methodology and virtual model for creating a digital, conceptual, and affective mapping of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that occurred in 2010. We especially appreciate how Morey acknowledges the conceptual gains from engaging with such experimentation. As he notes, his actualization of the MEmorial, now just “a plan for a virtual, potential Memorial,…is not necessary for the project to succeed.” Morey offers a specific justification for such claim. In order to establish deep ecological relationships, he argues that we have to find ways to write about ecological disasters in ways that affect us and others and help tune us into our complex relations. Producing electrate ecompositions such as the Deepwater Horizon Roadkill Tollboth, Morey insists, can help foster such modes of composition and affective experiences. While we agree with such specific benefit, we also think that, in general, speculative projects such as Morey’s are productive for opening up novel, unexpected paths of scholarly research. Digital visual studies is similarly committed to the potentiality of digital research, the not-yet-realized possibilities that can only come through risk taking and experimentation with digital research and production.
We are especially excited about doing digital visual studies because we think that scholars in RC/WS, Communication, and the Digital Humanities who are interested in the visual and the digital can make stronger efforts to consult and build upon each other’s research. Largely invested in their own disciplinary conversations, visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and digital humanities scholars often miss out on the opportunity to forge connections between their already existing research projects and to collaborate on new, innovative ones. This lack of connection has implications for not just how visual research gets done across these disciplines, but, as Finnegan notes, who reviews manuscripts for presses and how much typically siloed scholars know about digital visual studies coming out of disciplines not their own. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, digital visual studies can help build a community of scholars invested in experimenting with digital objects and digital research to enrich visual studies across our disciplinary domains. In bringing together scholars from RC/WS, Communication, and the Digital Humanities for this collection, we hope to model what productive avenues such collaborative efforts might open up.
2. Readers many notice similar arguments made in this introduction and Pink and Sumartojo’s introduction to Reconfiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. Any similarities are purely coincidental in that this introduction was written before we discovered Reconfiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. We encourage you to also read this collection.↩
3. We acknowledge that these fields of study are much more diverse than articulated here. We also acknowledge that these fields of study have overlapping interests. We simply identify here what we take away specifically from each field of study.↩