On November 3, 2021 Ignacio Farías, Tomás Criado & Andrew Gilbert submitted a project application to the Volkswagen Stiftung’s Open Up programme.
It was originally titled Multimodal appreciations: Prototyping kits for the evaluation and institutionalisation of more-than-textual ethnography.
In the summary, we stated the following:
“Our project takes on an impossible problem. Ethnographers from across the humanities and social sciences have recently experimented with multimodal forms of description, analysis and intervention in order to grasp slippery research objects that otherwise remain outside of the apprehensible. This multimodal turn has resulted in a proliferation of more-than-textual forms that are impossible to classify and at odds with institutionalised modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Despite the important openings created by multimodal works, they are rarely seen as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. The current situation is problematic but to a certain extent understandable, as peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate such multimodal singularities? This project responds to this conundrum through two experimental moments that correspond to the two challenges producing the current impasse, those of evaluation and institutionalization. The first moment is constituted by a set of immersive exercises designed to describe and compare the affordances of selected more-than-textual or multimodal research artefacts. The second moment is a set of prototyping exercises designed to produce and test a toolkit to facilitate the evaluation and institutionalization of future multimodal research.”
The short proposal we submitted can be downloaded here.
On June 29, 2022 we were notified that our 18 months project had been successful. After a series of negotiations on the use of the budget and the composition of the team, we slightly tweaked the project title and agreed to start officially on March 1, 2023.
