Curating the Feed: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Digital Image Feeds and their Curatorial Assemblages

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Christoph Bareither; Professor Dr. Benno Stein; Professorin Dr. Sabine Wirth
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421299207

The key goal of the proposed project is to gain a better understanding of digital image feeds and their curatorial assemblages. We ask how ever-evolving networks of digital practices, user interfaces, and algorithms co-curate image feeds on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Pinterest. How are digital image feeds designed? How are they embedded in user interfaces and complex media environments? How are they algorithmically controlled? And how are they entangled with the everyday lives of countless social media users? Our work takes its cue from the ongoing Curating Digital Images project that is part of the PP The Digital Image, but its focus on digital image feeds confronts a completely new set of challenges requiring strong interdisciplinary research. The project combines 1) digital anthropology (PI Christoph Bareither), 2) media studies and interface studies (PI Sabine Wirth), and 3) computer science and natural language processing (PI Benno Stein). The three areas analyze different facets of the curatorial assemblages that shape image feeds. Digital anthropology will use the methods of digital ethnography (participant observation, interviews, media diaries) to study the complex relationships between technology and human beings. Specifically, we consider a young generation of users who are experts in the curation of image feeds and examine how the feeds affect their everyday lives. In contrast, media and interface studies work toward a historical and media theoretical contextualization of image feeds, and they ask how user interfaces, design strategies, and affordances become part of the curatorial assemblages. Finally, computer science and natural language processing (NLP) illuminate the ways in which algorithms and those who control them participate in the curation of image feeds. Through them, we can also explore how algorithmic interventions can critically reflect on one-sidedness in contemporary social media and provide a basis for work on the next generation of image feeds.Our interdisciplinary work will be enhanced through collaborations with other PP project groups and an international lecture series. Through its interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional research design, our project contributes to all three main goals of the PP The Digital Image: 1) By acknowledging that digital images are often intrinsically related to image feeds and by studying the role of these feeds within networked societies, it significantly contributes to the study of the phenomenon of the digital image; 2) By conceptualizing digital image feeds and their curatorial assemblages, it provides new building blocks for the interdisciplinary theory of the digital image; 3) Through its algorithmic interventions, it lays the conceptual groundwork for technological innovation and, thus, takes the practical side of the digital image effectively into account.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2172: The digital Image