Doing Digital Visual Studies:

An Introduction

Final Note

In her 2011 Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World, Susan Delagrange reflects on the immense progress that has been made at the intersection of visual and digital production. Delagrange recounts a 2003 TechRhet listserv discussion about Cheryl Ball’s experimental job materials—when Ball was a PhD candidate at Michigan Technical University. In her application, Ball wanted to include an online portfolio of visual designs, but as the listserv discussion about her portfolio continued, Delagrange notes, “both the web usability and inclusion of images were debated” (vii). Eventually, the listserv contributors advised Ball to “omit the graphic and interactive elements of her job market website” and to “instead use only alphabetic, printable texts, thus mapping principles developed for spoken and written argument directly onto multimediated hypertext” (viii). Such anecdote demonstrates that visual research and production—especially in fields that were once dominated by text and alphabetic literacies—are often accompanied with significant risk and require researchers to undertake experimental methods. For Delagrange, the risk was becoming the first faculty member of a Big Ten university to successfully submit a born-digital visual project (Technologies of Wonder) for tenure. This risk is echoed in the very first question that opens Delagrange’s Technologies: “What is/should be the place of the visual in academic inquiry and representation?” (v).

In many ways, this collection is evidence that Delagrange’s 2011 question is still relevant today. While the disciplines of RC/WS and Communication have come a long way in integrating the visual into our research and production practices, we argue that even more risking taking and experimentation is necessary in a data-driven era to keep advancing knowledge in these respective disciplines. We offer this collection, then, as an experimental exercise in digital visual studies. By experimental, we mean that each digital research approach offered in the first part of this collection is in many ways a test of a methodological idea. This first part of the book, in fact, can be thought of as an experiment to test the value of visual digital studies for RC/WS and Communication at large. The continued progression for visual studies is dependent on the experimental orientation of visual research and the willingness of scholars to take risks with their work. The questions raised thus far by digital visual studies in this collection have clearly moved past whether or not the visual has a place in relationship to alphabetic literacies and traditional forms of scholarship. But here we continue to ask what role the visual can and should play in our academic inquiries and representations of knowledge.

In working at the nexus of visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and the digital humanities, we especially hope to keep pushing the boundaries of how RC/WS and Communication scholars do visual studies. We believe that diversifying our methods, methodologies, and critical commitments will only yield more knowledge about how digital visual artifacts and practices are impacting local and global communities and vice versa. Our theories about the visual, after all, are dependent on the participating bodies, critical apparatus, and research approaches that come into relations with various objects of study. The contributing scholars here thus embrace the risks of experimentation in order to harness any potential that digital design, research, and delivery may afford visual studies.

Due to such risk taking, we ask for you to approach this collaborative research project with an open attitude toward imperfection, if not failure, understanding the latter to be not an opposition to success but rather a mode of iterative learning and a productive pathway to experimental methodological futures. In each of chapter, authors reach toward innovation and engaged in experimental projects that are intended to be built upon rather than taken up as finished and completed methodological projects. In their chapter with virtual geosemiotics, for instance, Archer and Collins argue that while virtual geosemiotics certainly cannot replace field work that allows one to do in situ research, this virtual method does offer a productive starting point for visual scholars interested in emplacement and the study of signs within local semiotic ecologies. In her chapter, on the other hand, Hallinan models what might be done with the Wayback Machine and digital media archaeology and ends by identifying how others might start their own research projects via this research approach. This collaborative digital research project as a whole, then, is intended to act, perhaps more than anything, as a springboard for methodological invention.

We especially hope that readers with diverse positionalties, perspectives, and commitments will build on this work as they bring both their inventive spirits and radical expertise to DVS. We believe that the contributing work to this collection is full of potential. Yet, we also know it is constrained by who has and who has not contributed, what methodologies and perspectives have been and have not been foregrounded, and what digital visual artifacts have been and have not been focused upon. We thus fully recognize that we have only touched the iceberg of what can be done when we think critically about digital visual phenomena and work creatively and collaboratively to harness the potential of digital technologies for visual studies.

We especially recognize, as we touch upon more substantively in the interlude, that in order for DVS to move forward as ethically and inclusively as possible, more diverse bodies, perspectives, and collectives are needed to help us imagine how DVS can do better. In that vein, we have designed this collection with the rich rhetorical insights about the powerful tradition of call and response in mind. In African American oral traditions, as Keith Gilyard and Adam Banks draw on Molefi Kete Asante to note, call and response is a pervasive modality that sometimes depends so heavily on interaction and co-creation of meaning that this practice generates not the delivery of a message but the unfolding of a “message event” (48) [their emphasis]. Such message events often heavily rely on “hearership” [again their emphasis] in which the listeners hold the speakers accountable (49), and they often do so, in Geneva Smitherman’s words, by, among other moves, “testing your performance as you go” (118). Interestingly, in their introduction to a recent special issue, Angeletta KM Gourdine, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Shauna Pomerantz embrace Smitherman’s notion of call and response to imagine their special issue as an interruption into contemporary conversations in International Girlhood Studies. As we understand it, interruption does not have to be interpreted as a negative feedback loop; it can, instead, be conceived as an orientation that extends conversation, redirects it, and enhances its impact (4). Inspired by the rhetorical power of these ideas, we imagine this collection as a message event with the responses in the second part of the collection (presented in video and written form) speaking back to, if not interrupting, the contributing DVS experimentations presented in the first part. The responses include the diverse voices and insights of scholars from visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and the digital humanities who have all engaged in important, and oft innovative, work related to visual studies. As a hearership intended to invite greater accountability, these scholars were specifically asked to help us interrogate the ethics of DVS and (re)imagine how DVS might unfold differently if critical race, decolonial, Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, and disability studies perspectives took up a more central place in DVS. Conjured through an interview style, these contributions forward critical advice, suggestions, and visions for how scholars invested in DVS can not only rethink and/or extend some of the working assumptions articulated in this collection but also move forward in ways that open up opportunities for more constructive ways of designing, producing, and collaborating to generate more accessible, inclusive, and just DVS projects.

As the editors of this collection, we want to close, then, by advocating for diversifying digital visual studies as we take risks to experiment even more with digital visual studies—a point that is especially important for graduate education and thus highlighted in this collections’ afterward. New digital visual phenomena are constantly unfolding on local, national, and transnational scales that demand scholarly attention, especially ones that contribute to unequal power dynamics and ongoing systems of oppression. In addition, new digital technologies are being invented every day that make possible new approaches to digital visual studies. This collection, as a whole then, ought to be considered an invitation to take up emerging phenomena and digital technologies for both serious engagement and inventive play in visual studies. One day, perhaps, digital visual studies will become an obsolete title, as the digital will be so intertwined in visual studies that there is no need to highlight the digital’s inflection in the design, implementation, and presentation processes of visual studies. In the meantime, however, we encourage more diverse critical engagement and digital play, experimentation, and risk taking. And as we embrace the digital more critically, creatively, and collaboratively in our visual research, we are excited to learn how digital visual studies can move forward from here in even more constructive, ethical, and powerful ways.

Works Cited