While authors and artists can attempt to account for rhetorical velocity by anticipating the third party recomposition of their
own work (DeVoss & Ridolfo, 2009), they can never fully control where or how the things they produce will circulate.
Things, especially in a digital age, simply, or rather complexly, flow. We need methods that can explain how new media
practices enable things to experience reproduction and redistribution and thus circulate widely at viral speeds (335). [Put
another way,] an image’s rhetorical meaning is determined by the unpredictable consequences that emerge in its various
occasions of use. An image’s meaning is never stable. (338)
Currently, “images, like other matter, are difficult to depict in flow in terms of space, time, and function. Images appear before us like buildings and books—as fixed, transitive things that have already been built and delivered. As such, we have a habit of studying images much like we read books; we ‘skew them into [stable] objects palatable for a print gaze’ in order to discover how they function in specific contexts and fixed locations” (336). Instead, Gries argues, we need to see images as events: “images conceived as events can be studied as a dynamic network of distributed, unfolding, and unforeseeable becomings… [S]tudying image as event is thus a necessary move if scholars want to recover rhetoric’s emergent, distributed, and contingent qualities and more fully account for images’ dynamic contributions to collective life” (335).
Methodology
Gries gives steps for the methodology of iconographic tracking:
- “Iconographic tracking begins by taking a macro-scaled, digital approach to collect a large data set using basic search engines with image search capabilities” (339). In this stage, researchers need to be open to unpredictable possibilities and go down some rabbit holes.
- “Once a significant amount of data has been collected, a second phase of research begins—assembling data into a collection...Data mining often entails generating key terms, or tags, which function to make relationships and trends visible. As researchers identify associations between images, peoples, organizations, etc., they can begin to create a personal database, or collection of patterned information significant to their research goals…This phase of research thus requires scholars to only look at data long enough to assemble folders and generate key terms and tags that can be used as new search terms in the next phase of research” (339-40).
- “After collecting new data in relation to previously identified trends, researcher scan simply data mine and organize new data, generating new folders if need be. Even though research during this phase is more narrow and controlled, it also demands staying open to finding as much data as possible and thus moving back and forth between tracking an image in both visual and verbal form and assembling and reassembling data into appropriate folders” (340).
- “[S]uch research must be followed up by a micro-scale investigation. At this scale, researchers zoom in on specific collectives to determine how an image intra-acts with humans, various technologies, and other entities to undergo and spark change. Such micro-scaled investigation entails attending to seven interrelated material processes -composition, production, transformation, distribution, circulation, assemblage, and consequentiality. 343
and interviews” (343).
-- “Transformation is studied by paying attention to how a circulating image changes in terms of design, form,
medium, materiality, genre, and function as it enters into new associations” (343).
-- “While circulation becomes visible by tracking an image’s nonlinear, divergent, and unpredictable flows,
distribution can be studied by zooming in on the intentional strategies deployed to disseminate an image as
well as the intra-actions between involved humans and nonhuman entities” (344). Here it is best to use
approaches like CHAT (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory) and the epidemiological approach (Gladwell;
Seas).
-- “[A]longside researching all the material processes discussed thus far, iconographic tracking works on a
micro-scale to identify the diverse consequences that emerge from an image’s exterior relations.
Consequentiality is accounted for by zooming in on the varied associations images enter into and identifying how divergent rhetorical consequences materialize via these intra-actions” (345).
She applies this methodology to the Obama Hope image.
Ecology
Ecology isn’t really used in this article (though she does mention Edbauer’s work), but we can see ecology in the way Gries describes rhetoric:
rhetoric is a distributed process whose beginning and end cannot be not easily identified. Like a dynamic network of
energy, rhetoric materializes, circulates, transforms, and sparks new material consequences, which, in turn, circulate,
transform, and stimulate an entirely new divergent set of consequences. It is, in simple terms, a distributed network of
becomings in which divergent consequences are actualized with time and space. As such, rhetoric is all around and
within us; it permeates our lives, reassembles collective space, and shapes material reality in all kinds of diverse ways. (346)
This is very similar to how Syverson describes the ecology of writing.
Key Terms
- Circulation studies: “an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourse in motion. In circulation studies, if we can call it that, scholars investigate not only how discourse is produced and distributed, but also how once delivered, it circulates, transforms, and affects change through its material encounters” (333).
- Method: “an aspect of a mode of inquiry, consisting of a more or less tightly coupled constellation of strategies for dealing systematically with phenomena as objects of study, according to a tradition of inquiry and its accountabilities” (333).
- Circulation: “spatio-temporal flows, which unfolds and fluctuates as things enters into diverse associations and materializes in abstract and concrete forms” (335).
- Iconographic tracking: “a method specifically designed to empirically account for how images flow, transform, and contribute to collective life. Iconographic tracking employs traditional qualitative and inventive digital research strategies to (a) follow the multiple transformations that an image undergoes during circulation, and (b) identify the complex consequentiality that emerges from its divergent encounters” (337).
- New materialist approach: “ attends to a thing’s rhetorical becomings by heavily focusing on futurity - the strands of time beyond the initial moment of production when consequences unfold as things circulate, enter into diverse kinds of relations, and transform across form, genre, and media” (337).
- Composition: “an image’s rhetorical design” (343)
- Production: “the techno-human labor involved in bringing a design into material construction” (343)