By Sabine Niederer and Gabriele Colombo

UK and USA, Polity Press, 2024, 201 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4254-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4255-0 (paperback)

The opening sentences of Visual Methods for Digital Research: An Introduction (Niederer and Colombo, Polity Press, 2024) describe the ‘digital’ artwork titled Esercizio n.7/Déjà vu (2014)2 by artist Caterina Rossato on the cover: ’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 … 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. (Niederer and Colombo 2024: 1).

Two-page long description of a ‘digital’ artwork (Angela Bulloch’s Horizontal Technicolour, 2002, a throbbing digital light grid of blown-up film footage and solid colours)3 also launches Meredith Hoy’s From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press, 2017). Both Rossato’s and Bulloch’s works are what Hoy would call ‘of digital aesthetics’ (Hoy 2017: 11) Even though Rossato doesn’t employ any computational technology, she analogically mimics the experience of digital visual culture (almost like a Google Image Search result), a huge stream of similar, recombinatory and exchangable images, overlapping.

Although both titularly ‘Digital’ in their scope, the Niederer-and-Colombo volume and Hoy volume have vastly different objectives. The former intends to ‘do (research) things’ (Niederer and Colombo 2024: 3) with networked images on the platformized Internet; beyond their production, meaning, circulation and reception. Over six chapters it offers highly imaginative and resourceful data visualization research protocols that are rooted on the specificity of digital visual culture and expansive in terms of various interdisciplinary research goals.

The latter volume by Hoy argues the separation of ‘digital’ and ‘computational’ for digital art from an aesthetic standpoint while trying to trace a pre-(art)history of digital aesthetic in the pre-computer era. (2017: 1)

Yet, the former volume, very surprisingly (because the latter is about digital art itself and the former merely about researching digital images) uses more instances of digital art than the latter – to read digital images closely, distantly, generatively (Generative AI images) as it expands on research protocols, methodological nuances, and theoretical roadblocks. And these artworks are not used as illustrations of methods by Niederer and Colombo, but as inspirations and analytic devices.

The research protocols in the volume – although extremely varied, nuanced and customizable – are essentially advanced data visualizations. Advanced because the visual data which they re-visualize are not the products or results of research but the collected and prepared research material itself. These data visualizations are ‘more than the aesthetic culmination of analysis (Niederer and Colombo, 2019) or…a sort of materialization of media reveals (Allen, 2020) that represent the endpoint of most digital research.’ (Niederer and Colombo 2024: 26) Here they are employed to study a group of images (gathered by specific methodical means): close reading of a small set of images and distant reading of a large set of images. But how the sets are selected and organised are key in these methods. A vivid term for this preparatory act is ‘metapicturing’ (Rogers, 2021) which creates a kind of ‘composite image’ (Colombo, 2018) out of tens, hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of pre-selected and pre- contextualised images.

For example, on page 16 of the Niederer and Colombo volume, the artwork Reblogs or Context is the new content,4 designer- researcher Silvio Lorusso (2015) is discussed by the authors in order to introduce digital image contextualisation and pre-selection methods via source-based, expert-curated, query-based, and image-based techniques. The authors explain Lorusso’s visualization:

What does the ‘data visualization’ method of digital artist Lorusso have in common with the data visualization methods of digital researcher Niederer and Colombo – not in an aesthetic sense (art or non-art), nor ontological sense (what is art? what is method?), neither in processual sense (what is an artist’s method vs what is a researcher’s method) but in a generative epistemological sense – what kind of knowledge they tend to create respectively ?

Hoy does a revelatory comparison in this regard in the Introduction and Conclusion chapters of her volume. She reminds us that data visualization is the prime method of knowledge-making for digital artists, corporate platformised visual culture industry, and academic researchers alike. But the respective methods are worlds apart. For Hoy:

And later, for example., in our case, the task of data / information visualization is visualizing sets of visuals themselves, adding another dimension.

Yet the two ends of this epistemological binary join each other in circle – like the self-eating serpent Ouroboros – the mythical snake which eats its own tail, at once self-destructing and self-nourishing. The vastness of digital visual data, and the even vaster options to join the visual data dots by myriad methods to make meaning, turn the digital field not very unlike the analog reality itself. The digital artist and the digital researcher get conjoined here. According to Hoy:

Hoy exemplifies,

A visual data visualization that destroys the overtly visible in the visuals altogether.

In order to ascertain the ‘Visual vernaculars’ (Niederer 2019; Pearce et al 2020 of various online platforms (search engine, social media and others, leviathan carriers and corpora of circulating images) – how each platform visually formats a specific issue or topic like, say, ‘climate change’ or ‘#beautifulwoman’ – Niederer and Colombo advise the method of stacking. They demonstrate it with the query of the keyword [campus] in Google Image Search. Here translucent versions of all image results are layered on top of one another. It enhances, unlike the averaging out the overt in abovementioned Salavon’s Every Playboy Centrefold, the dominant visual feature of the images. In this case, the resultant image mostly looks like an open lawn. ‘Google Image Search thinks a campus is mostly students sitting together on a lawn’ (Niederer and Colombo 2024, 70).

The key difference between ‘Salavon Averaging’ and ‘Niederer-Colombo Stacking’ seems to be in their utilitarianism of generative epistemology – the usefulness of the respective knowledges they create. The former doesn’t want to deduce any significant feature in its dataset (rather wants to anticlimactically diminish all), contrasting the latter.

While one may simply dismiss that contrast as their generically binaristic behaviour (‘art’ being non-utilitarian and ‘research’ being utilitarian). But historically speaking, their contrast could be argued as not merely generic but generational. Johanna Drucker in several book lengths and bodies of collaborative works argues that the early era of Digital Humanities (now rarely existing as a single academic discipline) in the late 1990s-early 2000s refused the art-science divide. According to Drucker:

It is not a coincidence that the examples of digital arts discussed here (and others in their source volumes) are mostly from the 2000s. Two decades later in the 2020s, once again, they are proving relevant to serve as ‘methodological models’.

For Martin Warnke and Lisa Dieckmann:

Can Warburg and Jarry do digital fieldwork with Niederer and Colombo and me in Bangladesh?

Can a Student-People’s Uprising¹ under the banner of ‘Anti-Discrimination’ be a lens for the GSM (Gender and Sexual Minorities) digitality of Bangladesh?

In the bloodied last week of July 2024 marching towards the two-day One-point Movement in Bangladesh7 that toppled the incumbent government, a Facebook post was deleted.

Muhin Hashmi (pseud.), a popular Bangladeshi gay satire content creator on Facebook posted in Bengali that the impossible task of uniting all of Bangladesh can only be done around anti-GSM hatred. The unified backlash from all quarters of Bangladeshi gender and political spectrum followed. Hashmi deleted the Facebook post.

At the digital ‘Manosphere’ (Ribeiro et al, 2021) of Bangladesh’s platformised content in Bangla, the GSM idiolect shoehorns itself amongst the ‘circulatory assemblages and representational tropes’ (Mukherjee and Nizaruddin, 2022: 5) of the majoritarian dialect.

Yet, despite being in the lowest rung among South Asian countries as per the LGBT Equality Index, Bangladesh’s production and circulation of platformised GSM-related content (collectively christened Gender Variant Content or GVC) in Bengali – philic, phobic, coded, passing and hate speech – is voluminous and steadily accelerating.

The online crowd politics, activated by young men (often students) – historically both the fuel and the fire in all the recent socio-political-cultural uprisings of Bangladesh – has been paradoxically both progressive, and reactionary. Bangladeshi Gender and Sexual Minorities, trebly bound with religious proscriptions, social stigmatization and constitutional law have had their idiolect actively or passively silenced by the dialect of ‘more urgent’ progressive discourses.

The 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement that, within weeks, climaxed into the two-days One-point Movement toppling a 16-year-old dictatorship, has created a unique nationwide socio-political-cultural upheaval. The movement reached its goal on the wings of platformised social media content, online (despite repeated Internet blackouts) and hundreds of young (including minors) students shot, maimed, and killed – on ground. Preceded and followed by several major Internet-fuelled nationwide controversies about GSM vis a vis nation-building, this volatile and violent period from June 1 to August 5, 2024 was an interregnum of relative GSM content ‘radio silence’.

Fortified by the methods above, instead of relevant ‘controversy mapping’ online (Munk, Meunier, Venturini 2019) before and after, can we research the ‘radio silence’ triggered by the ‘Anti-Discrimination’ ideologies instead? Can it help us design visual methods for digitally researching the GVC (Gender Variant Contentscape) of Bangladesh?

Taking inspiration from Jarry’s penchant from anomaly and Warburg’s attention to ‘seemingly insignificant detail’ we will approach the aforementioned ‘radio silence’ of GVC in Facebook.

Niederer and Colombo’s volume’s Chapter 3 ‘Networked Images: Platform Image Analysis’ (2024: 48–71) on close reading small sets of images and especially its subchapter ‘Single-Platform Visual Analysis: Studying Multiple Issues on a Single Platform ’(Niederer and Colombo 2024: 52–59) is relevant here. If the research question here is what does the silence of GVC content makers among the huge content surge about the ongoing Student-People Uprising tell us?

Since in this case, the reduced production and circulation GVC content are the ‘sites of meaning’, we have to start our data collection for visual research design against the grain of the platform metrics, yet employing them. The ranking and hashtags of collective images have to be examined from the bottom of the list and not from the top, because we are looking for the covert.

Niederer and Colombo provide some key advice for reading the silent sites of meaning:

The GVC content might have developed new kinds of ‘codes of silence’ in the tumultuous times, they might be missed out if we don’t modify our keywords of search. Studying the content of prominent GVC Influencers closely during this time period might help us here.

The flow of multiple genres of GVC visual content (the ‘pornified’ content for example) whose topic deliberately avoid any mention of the ongoing uprising can be a useful resource for reception studies (platform metrics of like / share / comment for example). In the time of explosive visibilization of all Bangladeshi Facebook content during the uprising, Facebook GVC content might have been finding a losing battle of going ’re-closeted.’ It is up to this research design to test the assumption of this hypothesis.