The symposium offers insight into methodologies to study cultural and social practices through and with social media visual content. It tackles questions related to the strengths and weaknesses of computational tools and techniques to produce deep understandings of these practices, suggests alternative ways (e.g., ethnographic, feminist, interpretative) to approach “big data”, and provides guidance to investigate the intersection of technology, media and culture. Applications of these “alternative” visual methods is discussed in relation to a range of contemporary social media platforms, among which, Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Session 2: Researching Social Media Visuals as Media, Technology and Culture
Moving with digitally mediated stories: A method of virtual dwelling
(Brianna Wiens)
This presentation will offer some thoughts on how, through the method of virtual dwelling, social media stories from marginalized and targeted communities can gain traction. Through a case study of multiracial identity accounts on Instagram, Wiens will discuss how mixed-race representation can stand as sites of expression that function as alternate rhetorical spaces where mixed-raced vernaculars are mediated, validated, and circulated. By demarcating embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, this work suggests that the relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully, offering a glimpse of what she calls “the ethos of the in-between”: a methodology and ontoepistemology of intermediality.