Documenting Black Lives: Multimodal Approaches to 'Black Witnessing'
Welcome!
Below is a list of definitions, references and readings, and recap survey from today’s lecture:
CONCEPTS & DEFINITIONS
Ethnography: Ethnography describes a stance of inquiry that seeks to understand how culture works. Ethnography is a way of seeing that encourages close examination of phenomenon in place and of time, beginning with an orientation toward how and what we notice (Wolcott, 2008). As a domain of methodological inquiry, ethnography describes both a product of witnessing encounters and interactions and an intricate process of sitting with participants in situ while engaging cultures as-are overtime.
Virtual Ethnography is a research approach for exploring the social interactions that take place in virtual environments. These interactions often take place on the internet in sites such as newsgroups, chat rooms, and web-based discussion forums (Given, 2008; Hine, 2000) source
Digital Ethnography explores the impacts of new media on human interaction (Wesch).
Hashtag Ethnography is “concerned with the ontological implications of digital practices” (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).
Hashtag Archiving “is a process of capturing and preserving social media data assigned to the visual (#) and nonvisual (U + 0023) dimensions of code that also requires interpretive analysis and collaboration” (Conley, 2021).
Multimodality is an approach for describing movement across texts, modes, and spaces, and how they–as resources enter into (the construction of) meaning. Here, multimodality is a concept for thinking beyond language to include all modes as socially shaped resources that can be presented through a range of media. Multimodal practices and processes using various computing and media tools offer different ways to orient oneself to content and data.
Citizen Journalism “refers to the reporting of news events by people without journalism training. These non-professionals use the Internet and social media to spread information. Members of the public report about news that is ignored by mainstream media, which includes newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters, or by media outlets under the government's control. The term was coined in 2000.” (Kivak, 2022)
Transmedia Journalism is characterized by “the involvement of (1) multiple media platforms, (2) content expansion (as opposed to the repetition of the same message across multiple platforms), and (3) audience engagement” (Gambarato & Tárcia, p. 1386).
Media Witnessing - “refers simultaneously to [...] witnessing in media, witnessing by media, and witnessing through media” (quoted in Richardson, p. 5).
Black Witnessing “(1) assumes an investigative editorial stance to advocate for African American civil rights; (2) co-opts racialized onlines spaces to serve as its ad-hoc news distribution services; and (3) relies on interlocking black public spheres, which are endowed with varying levels of political agency, to engage diverse audiences” (Richardson, 2020, p. 7).
Ethics of Care - “Originally focused on the private and intimate spheres of life, the ethics of care has evolved into a philosophical inquiry, political theory and vision of advocacy aimed at a broader understanding of and public support for caregiving activities within a network of social relations. It assumes that there is both significance to the relation- ships between caregivers and care-receivers and general interest in all human relationships in a wide range of contexts, public or private” (An & Witt, 2022, Ethics of care in documentary filmmaking since 1968).
Immediations (in documentary film) describes “tropes that generate a sensation of emergency around endangered humanity–a sensation that makes us feel ‘nothing else matters,’ especially when these tropes are employed directly by disenfranchised subjects” (Rangan, Story & Sarlin, 2018).
REFERENCES & READINGS:
An, G. & Witt, C. (2022). “Ethics of care in documentary filmmaking since 1968”. French Screen Studies, 22 (1): 1-5.
Bonilla, Y. & Jonathan R. (2015). “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42: 4-17.
Conley, T.L. (2021). Hashtag archiving. Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data. Agostinho, D., D'Ignazio, C., Ring, A., Thylstrup, N.B., and Veel, K. (Eds). MIT Press.
Gambarato, R.R. and Tárcia, L.P.T. (2017).Transmedia Strategies in Journalism, Journalism Studies, 18(11), pp. 1381-1399.
Given, L. M. (2008). The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (Vols. 1-0). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412963909
Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. Sage Publications.
Kivak R. (2022). “Citizen journalism.” Salem Press Encyclopedia. Accessed April 6, 2022. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.montclair.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=119214038&site=eds-live&scope=site
Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.
McFadden, S. (2021). What giving a Pulitzer Prize for filming George Floyd's murder to Darnella Frazier really means. NBC News.
Pooja R., Story B, & Paige Sarlin. (2018). “Humanitarian Ethics and Documentary Politics” Camera Obscura 98, Volume 33(2); 1-12.
Pryluck, C. (1976). Ultimately we are all outsiders: The ethics of documentary filming. In A. Rosenthal (Ed.), New challenges for documentary (pp. 255–268). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rangan, P. (2017). Immediations: The humanitarian impulse in documentary. Duke University Press.
Richardson, A. (2020). Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. Oxford University Press.
Sanders, W. (2010). “Documentary Filmmaking and Ethics: Concepts, Responsibilities, and the Need for Empirical Research.” Mass Communication and Society, 13:528–553.
Squires, C. (2022). What happened to the witnesses. NY Mag.
Wolcott, H. F. (2008). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Oxford, England: AltaMira Press.
“[Untitled],” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed April 8, 2022, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/12555.
RESPOND (Please take a moment to fill out the recap survey from today’s lecture):
Recap survey form: https://forms.gle/oai1vuLGSaTohJrL7