Preface

In an age where images pervade our digital culture and shape societal discussions, the need to examine them critically has never been greater. The scholarship on visual methodologies has traditionally focused on studying images – their production, meaning, circulation, and reception – and their role as research tools. This book, Visual Methods for Digital Research, builds on the field of visual methodologies while focusing on the specificity of digital visual culture. It offers methods and approaches tailored for the researcher and student interested in contemporary digital visual culture. Each chapter starts with a vignette (an artwork or a picture depicting a particular research setting) that sets the tone for the themes discussed in the chapter.

For this preface, it seems only fitting to start with the cover of the book you hold in your hands. The cover image shows Esercizio n.7 / Déjà vu by artist Caterina Rossato: an assemblage of cut-out landscapes, neatly arranged one behind the other, is held together by two poster clips. The images combined create new and non-existent landscapes that yet seem familiar. Where are these mountains again? Didn’t I swim in that cold lake? By layering and stacking, the landscapes become a collection of memories of mountains, canyons, forests, lakes, and buildings illuminated by rays of sunlight.

The work not only shows a collection of images, reassembled in this case to trigger the sense of déjà vu and play with false memories of landscapes visited. It also is a beautiful example of – to put it very simply – ‘doing things’ with images. In this book, we discuss methods for studying digital images that work with images by assembling them, re-displaying them, overlaying them, annotating them, talking to them, and so on. The cover image speaks to us as visual digital methods similarly involve creative ways to use images as material. Art and the realm of design are important sites of visual research, where – just as in visual digital research – the results often raise new questions. That is the excitement and inspiration we find in this field and the reason we draw in examples from the arts when discussing visual digital research.

In our research and teaching, we have increasingly turned our attention to the study of mostly visual materials. In 2019, we started to describe and publish some of the approaches for doing research with and about digital images with the international journal Diseña. In the issue dedicated to design methods, we outlined visual methodologies for collaborative research, cross-platform analysis, and public participation (Niederer & Colombo, 2019). A few years later, in the same journal, we curated a special issue dedicated to visual methods for online images (Colombo & Niederer, 2021), collecting a variety of research perspectives for approaching digital visual culture with visual methods.

This book is intended as a guide for researchers and students who share our interest in visual methods and may consider using them in their own digital research. It offers a range of approaches for interfacing online images that seek to understand, reanimate, republish, and change perspectives on our digital visual culture. It offers practical advice on how to use visual research methods effectively and provides examples of how (digital) visual research methods have been used in different research contexts. It is our hope that this book will inspire other researchers and students to consider the potential of visual research methods for their own practice.

Research considerations

While the book’s primary focus is on studying images in groups, it does not overlook the importance of the single image. Drawing inspiration from canonical works on the subject, it advocates for a methodology that combines both distant and close reading. This dialectical approach echoes W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the ‘pictorial turn’, highlighting how each image serves as a microcosm of cultural meaning that requires deep analysis. The theme of social and cultural relevance runs throughout the book. Most projects mentioned in the chapters lean heavily into issue mapping (Marres, 2015b) and controversy mapping, underscoring the societal impact and implications of the images under study.

0.1 Esercizio n.7 / Déjà vu. Caterina Rossato, 2014.

Positioned firmly within the humanities, this book bridges the gap between theory and practice. It takes into account seminal works in visual communications and visual methodologies, incorporating perspectives from scholars such as Aiello and Parry, and Rose. The book serves as both a theoretical primer and a practical guide, offering a comprehensive framework enriched by compelling examples and hands-on techniques. Whether you’re a student or an experienced researcher, this book aims to make the – sometimes complex – field of digital visual research more accessible.

This book does not offer chapters dedicated to the ethics of digital research or the critical assessment of the problematic hegemonic position of a handful of online platforms. Nonetheless, ethical considerations, particularly concerning whose images are studied and how, underpin the works presented in this book. Data feminism and the ethics of studying images that were not explicitly created for research purposes are discussed in various case studies. We encourage the readers of this book to think critically about the visual data they engage with and how to do so responsibly.

Another element that stands firmly behind the scenes consists of the ways of working: the practical aspects of doing digital research – which often takes place in group work, sprints, and collaborations. The book intentionally avoids extensive lists of tools, focusing instead on the conceptual underpinnings that can be applied across a variety of platforms and technologies. Rather than one-on-one How-to’s, we presented research protocols more like recipes, offering the reader a foundation upon which to improvise and innovate, and which they can adapt to their own research contexts.

In selecting the case studies, artworks, and scholarly references featured in this book, we have made a deliberate choice to draw upon our own academic and experiential backgrounds, with roots in the humanities and within a European setting of applied sciences (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Milan, Italy, specifically). Our research contexts are also interwoven with highly collaborative practices of design as well as artistic and cultural research. As we present these examples, we aim to offer readers a window into the research settings that have informed our own work, paying testament to the people and settings that have shaped our perspectives and understanding of the field.

Then again, this book does not exist in a vacuum. It is in conversation with a vast and growing body of work in digital and visual methods, data feminism, and visual communications. If you have interests in these fields, this book serves as both an entry point and, hopefully, a catalyst for deeper exploration.

Outline of chapters

Chapter 1 discusses theorizations of the digital image. Through the critical analysis of art and design projects, we review different characterizations of digital images, including their materiality, networked nature, multiplicity, and circulation. We end the chapter with a review of different strategies for compiling collections of images.

In chapter 2, we detail various displaying formats and present strategies for distant-reading large collections of images. The chapter is dedicated to analytical techniques for studying (medium- or large-sized) image sets with a distant-reading approach (as opposed to close-reading smaller groups of images). The distant-reading approach can be used to identify recurring visual formats and themes within a collection of images, or to study the circulation and modification of images across online spaces.

Online images may also be studied in relation to their networked nature. Moving towards the network of images means moving outside the demarcated image that will now be studied alongside its digital context. That images are networked means they need to be considered ‘not as solitary objects, but as a part of a network of other images, users, and platforms’ (Niederer, 2018, p. 47). Chapter 3 introduces methods for close-reading small sets of images, with a sensitivity towards their networked nature and the role of online platforms in ranking, formatting, and co-producing (visual) content.

The question of which images are deemed more visible than others online, thanks to the work of social media platforms and search engines in labelling and prioritizing content, is further explored in chapter 4. Here, we address the topic of inequalities in (visual) data sets, presenting techniques for studying bias in the visual representation of various issues online. We discuss successful images and present (visual) research methods aimed at understanding how and why specific images spread better than others.

Attending carefully to the missing (or unsuccessful) images in a folder is also at the centre of chapter 5, where we present participatory visual methods. Here, we turn the attention to what is missing from a collection of images and how to use participatory techniques to address this gap. Drawing from recent (data) feminist theories, which ask researchers...