Multimodal Appreciation: A Kit for Evaluating Multimodal Works in Anthropology and Beyond
Written by Judith Albrecht, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J Maier.
Published CC BY SA Institut für Europäische Ethnologie · HU Berlin, 2025 [ISBN 978-3-00-084575-8]
Cover and layout design: Dina Fluck
Acknowledgements
This book has been made possible with the generous support of the Volkswagen Foundation (project number 0069945-00) as well additional funding from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.
Summary
This kit provides a set of practical exercises and a framework for valuing and assessing multimodal works. It recognizes their unique capacity to weave together and activate diverse media forms, collaborative practices, and public engagement while expanding the traditional boundaries of anthropological knowledge production.
This kit is intentionally designed as an open-ended, dynamic resource. We are certain that there are dimensions we have overlooked and anticipate that new dimensions will emerge through its use. This is why you’ll find blank cards, expandable lists, adaptable templates, and blank pages throughout the kit – they are invitations for you to contribute your own insights, document new approaches, and expand the kit based on your experiences in appreciating and evaluating multimodal works. Your engagement with the kit actively shapes its evolution, making it a lively and collectively enriched resource rather than a fixed set of instructions.
Download
Here you could download the kit in full. Below you could also check and download the seven components of the kit as separate elements.
The kit’s components
1) The List of Multimodal Reference Works presents notable examples collected in 2023 in order to study and compare the aesthetic, multisensory, and methodological affordances of more-than-textual and multimodal works, serving not as an exhaustive collection but as an inspirational starting point for further exploration.
2) The Manifesto is a ode to multimodality, a discursive framework and a handy companion on your journey to appreciate and evaluate more-than-textual research. Or, to put it more bluntly: With it, you may change the landscape of evaluation as you know it. The manifesto provides the groundwork essential for understanding the challenges and opportunities that multimodality brings to anthropological research. It introduces and unpacks critical concepts – from collaboration and immersion to the multiplicity of versions and public engagement – that provide the theoretical depth and practical insights needed to contextualize and activate the other kit elements.
3) The Values Inventory: Learning to more fully appreciate and thus properly evaluate multimodal works requires that we extend or push conventional standards of what counts as academic, relevant, and original beyond their association with text and writing. This kit component thus offers users an expanded set of valuation criteria for how to appreciate and evaluate multimodal works.
4) These Instructions for Immersion will help users to identify the manifold affordances of multimodal works, something that requires paying close attention to the aesthetic or sensuous dimensions of knowledge forms as well as both unlearning media conventions and newly sensitizing our selves to what a research work is and can be.
5) The Dialogic Evaluation Protocol guides users through a joint assessment of a multimodal work. It is designed to bring evaluators into heightened awareness of the standards and decision-making processes they use when evaluating or reviewing a multimodal work or project. This in turn should advance the goal of identifying and articulating standards of what constitutes a “good” multimodal work, as well as improving the multimodal work or project under review.
6) This Chart of Situated Challenges will help users to identify, articulate, and relate common challenges that arise from producing multimodal research. It offers an exercise that will aid in navigating these challenges, while also refining your understanding of what working multimodally entails.
7) Map of Interventions: This guide to collective mapping primarily aims to help makers of multimodal works to identify the collaborators, allies, networks, and other resources they need to thrive in the larger ecosystems of knowledge production in which they are enmeshed.