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, reach new audiences, and activate latent potentials for a broad range of actions in the world. This multimodal turn has resulted in a proliferation of more-than-textual forms that are hard to classify and are at odds with institutionalised modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Despite the important openings created by multimodal works, they are rarely seen in academia as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. This is in part because peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate such multimodal singularities?
Our project (funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung’s Open Up call, 2023-2024) 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 documentary and immersive exercises designed to describe and compare the affordances of select more-than-textual or multimodal research artefacts. The second moment is a set of prototyping exercises designed to produce a toolkit to facilitate the evaluation and institutionalisation of future multimodal research.
This blog will accompany and document our exploratory work over the the course of the project. Here you will find short reflections, descriptions of our encounters, theoretical thoughts and other inputs.