RMeS Summer School 2017: Visual Methodologies

Get the Picture. Digital Methods for Visual Research

When? 26-28 June 2017
Where? University of Amsterdam
For? PhD Candidates and RMa Students
ECTS? 2 ECTS / 6 ECTS
(If you want to obtain 6 ECTS, you’ll have to attend the Digital Methods Summer School on 29-30 June as well, or alternatively write a paper. For more information contact RMeS-fgw[at]uva.nl)
Organizers? Prof. Richard Rogers (UvA/RMeS)
Registration

With the increasing focus on selfies and memes but also on Instagram stories, animated gifs, filters, stickers and emoticons, social media and digital communications are pushing for a visual turn in the study of digital culture. Such a push invites visual analysis into the realm of digital studies, too. One may begin to open the discussion of interplay by examining the new outputs such as journalists’ data visualisations as well as policy-makers’ dashboards like the open data city platforms. One may similarly compare visual literacies. Are there new ways of interpreting images through data, both substantively (which are the related materials?) and temporally (how do they develop over time? do they resonate? are they memes?). In digital methods, the image is not only a research object but also a research device. Making images “that can be seen and manipulated” (Venturini, Jacomy & Pereira 2015) enables scholars to access and actively explore datasets. How to make them and read them? At the same time, the technical properties of digital images both in terms of their color, resolution, and timestamp, as well as their ‘networkedness’, traceability and resonance, become available for research, allowing one to think with images (as visual guides and narratives) as well as through them (as data objects).

The Digital Methods Summer School, in collaboration with the Netherlands Research School for Media Studies (RMeS), is devoted to ‘visual methodologies’ for the digital. Indeed iconography, semiotics, framing analysis and multimodal analysis are among the approaches that may be applied to digital materials. One may also ask, does the online make a difference to the study of the visual? That is, with which approaches is the image considered primarily, or secondarily, as a digital object embedded in online media? Apart from the change in the setting of the object, there may also be methods that emerge from the new media, engines and platforms. What kinds of so-called ‘natively’ digital methods can be repurposed productively for visual analysis? How to make use of Google’s reverse image search?

More information will follow soon