Investigating Digital Visual Phenomena and Preserving Digital Visual History
In order to make our shared scholarly efforts as transparent as possible as well as make explicit why the specific methodologies included in this digital book project were chosen, we work here to identify the governing commitments, assumptions, and rationales that guide our collaborative efforts. Most obviously, digital visual studies (henceforth referred to as DVS) is committed to studying artifacts that are either born digital or become digitized and to generating new approaches for studying how such digital visual phenomena are shifting public participation and impacting collective life. It should go without saying that we recognize that studying images produced in more traditional media is certainly still a very worthwhile scholarly endeavor. As Alfred L. Martin has recently argued, we especially need to more deeply interrogate how the industry behind media such as television play significant roles in circulating particular representations of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) such as black queers. We also recognize the continued value of tracing images across historical print media in order to, among other things, investigate how repetitive representations of minority community members construct certain “visual passcodes” that contribute to and perpetuate certain stereotypes (see Consuelo) and national-identity formations (see Olson) as well as how citizens have historically engaged with images to help grapple with pressing national issues and negotiate emergent anxieties and crises that emerge in public life (Finnegan 2015). Furthermore, we cannot overstate the importance of seeking out visual culture in diverse historical and contemporary cultural contexts and through decolonial and postcolonial lenses. Damián Baca’s work, as just one example, demonstrates how crucial visual-material artifacts such as pictographics and codices are in the rhetorical meaning-making practices of subjugated peoples working to resist Western colonization. Yet, we call for particular attention to the ever-widening array of digital-visual objects that beg for critical examination (digital political art, digital archives, digital advertisements, video games, digital photographs, websites, etc.). We especially support investigation of such artifacts that manifest and resist problematic cultural projections (Johnson and Pettiway), cybertypes (Nakamura) and racist tropes (Lebduska); participate in social movements and promote civil rights activism (see Edrington and Gallagher); and make visible typically unheard and undervalued stories and testimonies of minoritized community members (see Mir and Paschyn).
In terms of a digital visual object, in this collection we take as our critical object of study the now iconic red, white, and blue digitized version of Obama Hope. This image was first captured in 2006 by Mannie Garcia in a digital photograph that circulated minimally in news photos on various online websites. In 2008, Shepard Fairey found Garcia’s photograph in a Google Image Search and then, using Photoshop and other digital technologies, transformed it into the “Faireyized” version that become widely recognized during Obama’s first presidential election season. As Gries’ four-part case study in Still Life with Rhetoric details, this image experienced not only viral circulation but also viral transformation as citizens from all over the world appropriated and reappropriated it for various individual reasons and collective causes—a phenomenon that, as many chapters in this collection make evident, has not ended. As such, Obama Hope is an image that has a complex rhetorical history and much to teach us about not only how new media images circulate, transform, and impact collective life but also how emergent technologies, cultural practices, genres, and human thoughts and actions feed into such phenomena.
In their chapter for this collection, for instance, Phil Bratta and Gries explore how the Obama Hope image continues to impact popular culture and political history as Obamicons (webicons produced in the basic style of Fairey’s Hope design) have evolved into Trumpicons that serve a variety of political and cultural functions. Bratta and Gries argue that “if digital visual studies to have any lasting power, it must ask critical questions about race, power, ethics, and socio-political affairs.” Bratta and Gries thus draw on critical genre studies when doing iconographic tracking to disclose how new media genres emerge and evolve to play a notable role in the racial politics of the nation-state. Such methodology is especially important, Bratta and Gries argue, in order to explicate how vernacular new media genres such as Trumpicons are wrapped up with race in a reciprocal feedback loop of (re)production and (re)circulation and come to drive and sustain the racial politics at play in the contemporary United States, especially in an era of white supremacist post national logics.
Blake Hallinan’s chapter reminds us that when it comes to digital images, such visual research is often time-sensitive. Due to planned obsolescence, link rot, and problems with the durability of media, many of the digital technologies and related new media practices that fuel certain contemporary civic participation will fade from popular practice before we have a chance to fully investigate them. As Alexander Stille has noted, “[A]s the pace of technological change increases, so does the speed at which each new generation of equipment supplants the last” (301–02). “In fact,” Stille explains, “there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness of technology and its fragility” (302). As evidence, he cites the research of Paul Conway, a Yale University librarian, who has produced a digital graph dating back to ancient Mesopotamia illustrating that “while the quantity of information being saved in the digital era has increased exponentially, the durability of media has decreased almost as dramatically” (302). Such phenomenon is an especially important concern for digital visual studies in that another commitment of digital visual studies is to preserve digital visual history so that we can keep pace with and keep record of the digital technologies, new media practices, and digital visual artifacts that make civic participation and collective action possible in our contemporary era.
In this collection, we make two specific moves to help achieve this goal. First, we offer two datasets to help preserve the cultural-rhetorical history of the Obama Hope image. The first data set—titled “Obama Hope Dataset”—provides access to over 1000 webpages, preserved through the Wayback Machine, documenting when and where Obama Hope and hundreds of remixes have surfaced between 2008 and 2015 as well as several Trumpicons that have surfaced since 2011. This data set is downloadable in The Archiving Obama Hope chapter at the end of this collection. A permanent link to this dataset is also accessible in The Obama Hope Archive on OSF, the Open Science Framework. A much larger second dataset titled “Obama Hope Tweets” provides access to 24,945 tweets related to Obama Hope. A link to this data setset, which is housed via DocNow's Tweet catalog, is also available in the Archiving Obama Hope chapter.
This archival work contributes to the open data movement. As Jonathan Gray notes, open data “is not a free-floating, ahistorical concept, but a malleable idea whose meaning is continually reconfigured in response to shifting conceptions of governance and democracy in different contexts” (23). Part of this movement is recognizing the crucial role played by humanities archivists and librarians in determining the ways in which data access and preservation are fundamental to discovery and knowledge creation. In 2005, the National Science Board admitted that the “curators and annotators, librarians, archivists, and others, who are crucial to the successful management of a digital data collection” deserve to have their “creativity and intellectual contributions fully recognized” (27). But the open data movement also recognizes the value of open access to raw data and metadata in order to enhance collective knowledge building and expand research possibilities. DVS advocates for publicizing datasets of digital visual artifacts not only so that other scholars can draw on the data for their own research, but also to ensure that digital artifacts and their related rhetorical activities are preserved before disappearing from the World Wide Web (Ball). In offering open access to this data, we especially aim to preserve the visual history and legacy of Obama Hope with the hope that other scholars will not only use the data for their own research, but extend this archive through their own contributions. We also see these archival activities as continuing to extend an intellectual environment where needless methodological disputes between the humanities and sciences are displaced by a mutual respect and an acknowledgement that both are deeply invested in the ongoing transition from visual to visualization—from analysis to analytics.
The second move we make is to offer three different research approaches to help preserve visual history. First, Sarah Beck demonstrates how using social media to perform queer archival research has potential to preserve important historical moments for marginalized communities. For her chapter, Beck generates a small digital archive documenting a visual history of Barack Obama’s relation to LGBT issues during his presidency. Weaving queer theory with rhetorical theory as a methodology, Beck argues that using social media such as Pinterest can be a viable way to simultaneously queer digital archives and document queer history. While we have made the datasets mentioned above available in CSV format so that they are widely accessible to a vast majority of analytics tools (Excel, R, Python, Tableu, etc.), we applaud Sarah’s creative use of Pinterest to produce her own digital collection, especially in that such exercise is a useful means to quickly make visible patterns and anomalies in visual data. Lev Manovich, of course, has gone to great lengths to produce ImagePlot to make content pattern recognition with large data sets possible—efforts Gries’ own research has tried to enhance by developing different digital visualization techniques that can help identify patterns in circulation, genre diffusion, and rhetorical function (see 2017). But while we certainly encourage scholars to use ImagePlot and digital visualization techniques, we also believe that especially when it comes to dealing with small data sets, digital picture boards can be an adequate means for pattern identification of content. In addition, of course, Pinterest picture boards are widely accessible to a public audience, which, as Beck argues, is important for not only making queer history, which often goes unaccounted, more visible but also cultivating representational belonging.
In addition to producing open datasets and digital archives to help preserve digital visual history, media archeology—as Hallinan’s chapter demonstrates—can be a productive methodology for excavating digital technologies and associated media practices that were once active in cultivating visual culture but have since faded out of contemporary use. In her chapter, Hallinan relies on infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star 1999) and the Wayback Machine to recover the Obamicon.me website that made possible the production and sharing of Obamicons, which are largely responsible for the Obama Hope image’s broad circulation and surrounding metaculture in 2009. While this website was easily accessible and wildly popular for 2 years, its inventors, Paste Magazine, took down the website, cutting off what had become a popular means of civic engagement for many citizens not only in the U.S. but also the world. Digital visual studies is committed to investigating and documenting such ephemeral modes of civic action so that digital visual history can be properly preserved, and Hallinan’s chapter demonstrates how digital media archaeology can be a valuable approach in achieving such goals.
Last but not least, Beveridge and Nicholas Van Horn demonstrate the value of data science methods and macroscopic methodologies for studying digital artifacts at scale. Explaining to readers how they collected 24,945 tweets related to Shepard Fairey’s “Obama Hope” image and how they archived and preserved the tweets at DocNow!, Beveridge and Van Horn specifically model how other researchers can preserve and analyze Twitter data for their own digital visual projects. This type of work, they argue, is not only important for ensuring the sustainability of the data visualizations that generate productive insights but also in opening the data for other researchers to discover new patterns and comparisons for their own research. As a final bonus for digital visual studies, Beveridge and Van Horn visualize the data associated with the 24,945 Obamicon tweets to provide a visual history of the Obama Hope image—from 2008 to 2018. While Beveridge and Van Horn emphasize that it is important for our readers to remember that this visual history is only a history according to Twitter, this work extends the macroscopic context/history for Fairey’s iconic image—inviting readers to see the crucial reciprocity between studying digital visual artifacts and studying the networks themselves.
Producing Digital Visual Artifacts as a Research and Theory Building Practice
In addition to investigating digital visual phenomena and preserving digital visual history, DVS is committed to digital-visual production as part of the research and theory-building process. Such commitment aligns not only with digital rhetoric but also with critical making—what Matt Ratto calls a connection between two typically disconnected modes of engagement with the world: critical thinking—typically understood as conceptual work grounded in linguistics—and making—goal-based work grounded in socio-material-technical practices (252–60). To be expected, then, digital visual studies does not envision digital research methods, tools, and emergent digital products as divorced from the abstract practice of theory making. Instead, we agree with Roger Whitson (2013) that the digital enters into a recursive and creative relationship with the cognitive, discursive practice of doing theory. In common parlance of the digital humanities, the hacking that entails the adaptation, manipulation, and productive use of a given digital technology merges seamlessly with the yacking of theorizing to develop new knowledge about visual phenomena.
Such commitment to digital visual production also aligns with practice-based research, which advances knowledge partly by means of creative practice. As a methodology, practice-based research—commonly referred to as “research-creation” in Canada, “practice as research” in Britain and Australia, and “arts-based research” in the United States—considers creative design, experimental aesthetic practices, and artistic works as integral to the research process (Chapman and Sawchuk 5–6). In fact, such creative acts and artifacts are necessary for both research and research-generated-knowledge to emerge. With practice-based research, such creative acts and artifacts are an especially productive means for answering a research question and generating research insights that can be documented, generalized, and theorized (Smith and Dean 7). Deploying artistic and experimental practices as a key component of the researcher’s process also enables scholars to explore and analyze the relationship between technology and visual culture, understanding that technology is not simply a tool for creation but also “a mind-set and practice of crafting” (Chapman and Sawchuk 19). Due such affordances of practice-based research, we think this methodology is especially appropriate for DVS in order to fully understand how digital visual creation can fuel not only our own visual methods and theories but also civic participation.
In this collection, several authors engage in practice-based research, and through their work, exemplify why critical making and glitch studies are useful methodologies for generating new knowledge about and applications of visual studies. Shannon Butt’s chapter, for instance, demonstrates how 3D printing is a sense-making method that embraces difference as a site for rhetorical invention and encourages diverse ways of seeing and experiencing digital visual images. Working at the methodological intersection of critical making and disability studies, Butts specifically shows how printing a tactile, material portrait of Obama enables users to touch, feel, and see how measured elements such as color, light, slope, or density shape what we experience as sight. We believe such work is especially important in that, as Butts explains, through computer aided design, scholars can begin to explore how 3D printing translates visual data into topographical, printable interfaces that offer hands-on experiences with art and digital discourse - the embodiment of digital theory through material practice.
Kira (Kyle) Bohunicky, on the other hand, models how glitch studies, as a means of critical-creative play and arts-based creation, can enrich our understanding of visual media and remix as a visual production practice. Bohunicky specifically makes use of aleatory procedures (Vitanza 2000) to generate visual anagrammatics and glitch-based remixes, a process, they argue, that can not only enhance digital images’ dynamic qualities but also enrich their critical interventional possibilities in the civic arena. In addition, Bohunicky argues, “Glitch-based remixes [can] unearth blended techno-data-reality optics that challenge us to question how both our vision and view are always compromised and constructed.” As evidence, Bohunicky invents a glitch-based remix practice called image melding that can help discover shared visual registers between multiple kinds of media (image, game, film, etc.) and their potential meanings and expose what images can possibly become. Providing evidence of research-creation at play, we especially appreciate how Bohunicky models how new visual productions and critical research practices can open up when we take risks to fully engage in civically engaged, visual play.
Contemporary research with augmented reality (AR) also demonstrates how digital visual creation can be a valuable means of both research and civic engagement. In their introduction to Augmented Reality: Innovative Perspectives Across Art, Industry, and Academia, Sean Morey and John Tinnell succinctly explain what AR entails by elucidating how AR browsers take advantage of smartphones’ camera view to “create a unique visual-tactile interface that blends a person’s gaze of the physical environment with texts, graphics, and other media files that have been “geotagged” to specific coordinates on the Earth’s surface.” In addition, they explain how computer vision and image tracking software are now commonly built into AR browsers, “creating a more precise mode of aligning digital overlays on top of print media, building facades, signage, and other fixtures of the built environment.” In light of these advancements, they insist, the potential for AR applications to enhance education, tourism, and cultural heritage, among other fields of business and design, is quite promising. DVS is especially excited about AR’s promise because it holds the potential for upending the very nature and function of visual digital interfaces as we know them.
While the theoretical possibilities are immense for this work, AR driven methods also provide pragmatic applications that enhance both visual studies research and direct participation in public life. While Morey and Tinnell have both modeled such potential in their work with digital monuments and digital museum exhibits, artists and activists working as part of the Manifest AR collective have been creating “interventionist” augmented reality art since at least 2010. During the Occupy movement, for instance, artist Will Pappenheimer created an AR application that uses text from Occupy protester’s signs to generate digital skywriting that is viewable through a free mobile app. Contributing author Jacob Greene has also co-created an AR app that allows visitors of SeaWorld to learn about the hazards of marine captivity that often go on behind the scenes of this entertainment park. Such design, Greene argues, is especially important for generating alternative perceptions about contested places that can help intervene in ongoing problematic cultural practices. For his chapter in this collection, Greene models how AR can also be a useful means of analyzing and producing counterpublic remixes of the Obama Hope image—a popular remix practice that only continues to play a commentary role in national and international politics. Through his own critical making practices, he particularly demonstrates how mobile AR can counter what he calls “rhetorical isotropy,” a term used to describe the ways in which public images take on monolithic meanings and associations that could potentially elide more nuanced interpretations of their socio-rhetorical function. In doing so, Greene argues that and models how AR remixing can enrich avenues for rhetorical invention in the physical spaces of everyday life, especially as an emerging mass of mobile device users continue to explore the possibilities of augmented reality as a technology for public writing.
Inventing Digital Research Strategies and Presenting Research Digitally
One of the current challenges in visual studies is to account for the widespread circulation and diverse rhetorical activities of images such as Obama Hope that circulate across transnational lines. In recent years, Rebecca Dingo, Xinghua Li, Kevin DeLuca, Rohini S. Singh, and others have amplified why tracking images transnationally is important for studying how neoliberal, environmental, Internet, and foreign political policies are developed and sustained and investigating their implications for diverse bodies are impacted by circulating images. Caitlyn Bruce, on the other hand, has tracked graffiti across various countries to discover how it functions to imagine more democratic cities, develop and promote civic education, and generate “spaces for encounters across difference” (2). While methods such as iconographic tracking can help trace such global activity, iconographic tracking tends to provide a broad scope of rhetorical activity rather than bear down on the specific rhetorical ecologies in local on-the-ground contexts. In their chapter, Archer and Collins address this issue by modeling how the invention of alternative digital research strategies can yield productive insights about visual practices that unfold in difficult-to-access places across the globe. Archer and Collins forward what they call virtual geosemiotics to study the context-dependent meaning of Obama Hope murals that have surfaced in two different locations across the world. Virtual geosemiotics draws on visual semiotics and place semiotics and utilizes geo-spatial technologies (GST) such as Google Earth to enhance our understanding of how place contributes to the meaning of visual artifacts. While the spatial humanities have been quick to put digital tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps to work, Archer and Collin’s work models how GST and the practice of geotagging across platforms can also be useful to visual studies, especially for investigating how visual artifacts in faraway places are shaped by their emplacement in specific locations.
Such inventional work, we argue, is made even more visibly important when we present our research and arguments in digital form. In fact, another assumption of DVS is that digital visual research is enhanced through digital delivery. Digital scholarship has long been at the forefront of scholarly discussion, with more and more journals and presses offering digital publication options. Too many digital publication outlets, however, remain married to the traditional academic essay form, with options to simply embed digital pictures, video, and audio of the object/phenomena under study. Many of the chapters in this digital collection, on the other hand, use genres of digital delivery to facilitate research for the author and create an interactive experience for the reader so that meaning-making can be as co-productive as possible. In the chapter crafted by Bratta and Gries, for instance, readers can interact with a Google Map that documents the various locations across the world that Trumpicons have surface, clicking on markers to pull up metadata which provides links to media sources that readers can explore on their own. In Archer and Collins’ chapter, on the other hand, readers can watch a video recording of Archer and Collin’s search of Obama Hope remixes on the island of Sardinia via Google Earth. With best practices of accessibility and usability in mind, we especially advocate such digital interaction because when it comes to digital visual studies, content and delivery cannot be so easily divorced. They are mutually productive of both the research process and any research findings that may come to bear.
In order to make this digital book as interactive as possible, we have carefully designed all of the chapters in the first part of this book with what we hope are transparent means of tactile reader-text engagement. Whether you toggle data visualizations, follow images on Google Earth, watch tutorial videos, or access augmentations through AR, we ask that you dive into play during the reading process in order to both learn more about the author’s research processes and methodologies but also to activate your own meaning-making processes. Admittedly in this collection, the necessity and expectations for reader interaction varies. In Greene’s chapter, for instance, readers cannot access his remixes to fully understand his creative research process and argument without downloading an app from the Google Play store and using a mobile device to access augmented reality content. In her chapter, on the other hand, Beck embeds a Pinterest board and simply invites readers to scroll through her archive in order to discover for themselves the patterns and anomalies that emerge in her digital archive. We argue that no matter their interactive extent, the affordances of each presented methodology and method are enhanced through digital interaction. We invite you, then, to indulge in interaction with the contributing authors’ experimentations made possible through digital delivery.
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