HFIMK9501 ¨C Creative methods for making sense of multimodal social media

Course content

More than half of the global population uses social media. In many areas of the world social media is used by over 80% of the population. It is increasingly likely that to answer your research questions you need to also inquire into social media content or people¡¯s social media practices - explore what they do on, in and with social media and what else they do, when they are scrolling, posting, commenting, lurking, sharing or liking. This course focuses on the methodological implications and affordances of social media, in particular on what the ubiquitous visuality and the inherent multimodality of socially mediated communication implies for the ways in which we conceive of, generate, organize and interpret materials and data based on which we answer our research questions.

The course focuses on methods for analyzing people¡¯s multimodal social media practices with a particular focus on visual social media (e.g. the creation, curation, interaction and consumption of selfies, social media snapshots, memes, gifs, emoji, reels, lives, short video on apps and platforms like Instagram, TikTok, BeReal, Snapchat etc.).?

The subject is rooted in the disciplines of internet research, social media studies, media studies and visual culture studies and approaches research with an ethnographic sensibility. It centers the post as a basic unit of meaning making, and hence also of analysis on social media.?

We work with concepts and terms such as platforms, practices, norms, affordances, situatedness, multimodality, intertextuality, polysemy, meaning making, etc.

Learning outcome

When you have passed the course, you will:

Knowledge

• Know what contextual social media analysis is and how to conduct it.
• Have a functional understanding of various practices, tactics, and tools for analyzing multimodal social media content.
• Have in-depth knowledge of central theories and core concepts within the research field of visual social media studies.
• Have good insight into conceptualizing social media affordances and analyzing social media platforms and appspaces.
• Be able to contribute to the development of new knowledge by connecting the theoretical challenges in the field to your own research.

Skills

• Be able to present and explain key conceptual frameworks in the study of visual/multimodal social media.
• Be able to use theories and concepts from visual culture studies and media studies to make sense of social media visuality and digital visual practices.
• Be able to discuss what the multimodality of socially mediated communication implies for the conduct of your own research.
• Be able to devise a fruitful research agenda to make sense of multimodal content and practices online.
• Be able to conduct con