Visualizing Digital Media

This small, self-sustaining project initially emerged from a student-directed research collaboration. It is work being done together with my colleague Giorgia Aiello at the University of Bologna, Italy. We have also worked closely with Lara Portmann who is now doing her PhD with me under the auspices of the Elite Creativities project.

The Visualizing Digital Media project seeks to open up digital discourse studies to a broader semiotic perspective; there are two ways in which I see this happening. The first lies in simply paying more attention to visual communication. We know well, for example, that digital discourse is itself often as much visual as it is linguistic, concerned as much with the look of words as with their semantics. Beyond orthographic and typographic design, however, there is also more work to be done on the communicative uses of, say, emoji, video, GIFs, and non-moving images. (This is worked addressed by contributors in my co-edited volume Visualizing Digital Discourse; see below.) In a metadiscursive sense, there is certainly value in attending to the visual representation of digital media in, for example, commercial advertising, print or broadcast news, cinema and television narratives and/or public policy and educational settings. These metadiscursive visualizations inevitably encode and combine a range of language ideologies and media ideologies. In this regard, we have examined closely how digital media are visually depicted in commercial image banks which also source the news media with much of its imagery.

There is also a second reason why Visualizing Digital Media pursues a broader semiotic approach. A second key focus of the project is the semiotic ideologies which underpin the use and representation of visual resources in digital media. We are, here, concerned with people’s beliefs about signification or meaning-making – how it works and/or how it “should” work. In this regard, semiotic ideologies are always enmeshed in wider systems of social differentiation and symbolic authority. In other words, the way people talk about meaning-making says a lot about whose ways of making meaning are considered better and whose are most powerful or influential.

 Related publications

Aiello, G., Thurlow, C., & Portmann, L. (2023). Desocializing social media: The visual and media ideologies of stock photography. Social Media & Society.

Thurlow, C., Aiello, G. & Portmann, L. (2020). Visualizing teens and technology: A social semiotic analysis stock photography and news media imagery. New Media & Society, 22(3), 528–549.

Thurlow, C. (2017). “Forget about the words”? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting. Discourse, Context & Media, 20, 10-19.

Ben Aziza, O. (2016). Worlds apart? Visualizing youth and technology is Western and Arabic online news and stock photography. (MA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)

Portmann, L. (2016). The technological city and the rural idyll: A visual analysis of place in the representation of new media in mediatised stock images. (BA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)

Droz-dit-Buset, O. (2016). The technological divide: Old news? Gendered visualisations of new media in stock photography and online media. (BA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)

Hunziker, M. (2016). Normalizing the middle class: A visual discourse analysis of new media representations in mediatized stock photography. (MA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)