Marion Walton. 2024. Visual methods and multimodal digital research: Building skills, infrastructure and supportive communities of practice. Centre for Film and Media Studies, Cape Town. [Seminar presenta- tion].

Digital research methods have developed rapidly to investigate the flood of natively digital data about websites, mobile apps, and search engines, as well as the large quantities of messaging and media shared on and created for or by social platforms and LLMs every day. Until recently, these methods have been focused on textual or quantitative data, and their associated infrastructure and communities of practice have been relatively inaccessible to many scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences, particularly in the Global South.

While research with platform data still presents many pitfalls, data intensive visual methods and multimodal digital research with text, video, audio and image data have recently become far more accessible. I’ll introduce a collaborative project and given an overview of YouTube data collected for the Digital Methods for Social Media Research course (FAM4043S)and guide interested scholars on how to sign up for 4cat.uct.ac.za, the CFMS 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit, recently provisioned by the ACC and ICTS to support visual and multimodal scholarship and research training in CFMS.

Let’s discuss how best to build foundational skills in these areas while pursuing the sometimes seemingly incompatible goals of cultivating practices which (i) support public interest research (ii) counter patterns of asymmetrical access to data by “big tech” platforms and Northern researchers, (iii) enhance transparency and trustworthiness, (iii) are cognisant of regulatory limits and ethical practice and (iv) conduct research in a way which cultivates accountability and avoids extractive research relationships.