Taking Alfred and Aby to Bangladesh: Applying "Visual Methods for Digital Research"

This Polity Press volume addresses diverse practitioners of Digital Visual Culture - students, scholars and creators. Here, the primacy of 'visual' in the Visual Methods for Digital Research is not surficial or categorical only. The publisher's description summarises 'various approaches to studying digital images, including the distant reading of image collections, the close reading of visual vernaculars of social media platforms, and participatory research with visual materials.' But more importantly, here, the practice and product of digital visual artists act as specific touchstones - both inspiration and illustration for each chapter and each method. Yet that creative practice is generalised and analysed to be not just applicable but revelatory for various kinds of digital research. This review essay, starting with the volume above, briefly does a comparative study of arts-inspired Digital Humanities research projects of the noughties and now. Instead of 'how-to'-s, the research protocols in this volume here are more like recipes - 'offering the reader a foundation upon which to improvise and innovate, and which they can adapt to their own research contexts'. So a brief application is conducted about ascertaining whether or not a Student-People’s Uprising (2024) under the banner of ‘Anti-Discrimination’ can be a lens for the state of Gender and Sexual Minorities of Bangladesh. If we try to apply the visual methods in this book to the relevant Gender Variant Visual Content on the Social Media Platforms in Bangladesh, what would be the research design?