Figurations

The two main research questions driving this project were:

1. What genres of Photoshop(ping) appear in the collection of videos? (See paper published in the International Journal of Communication)
2. Building on 1 above; what figurations are generated and/or sustained through these inscriptions?

We use figurations to refer to any type of techno-social typification. For example, Donna Haraway (1997: 11) uses ‘figures’ to refer to the “necessarily tropic quality of all material-semiotic processes”. A key element of any figuration involves a shared purpose or relevance-frame (Couldry & Hepp 2016: p.66). By setting out to identify Photoshop figurations we believe that we are taking an important step towards gaining a better understanding of the creative technicities that underpin much of contemporary digital culture.

To answer the first of the above two questions, we created individual profiles for each of the videos collected for the research. (see Project Documentation for details of collection process) The answers to the second question were generated by synthesizing the data collected for each of the video profiles into figurations. Click on each of the figuration names to find a short description of each one. Each figuration was based on the types of “purpose” identified for each of the individual video profiles.