The Centre for Digital Culture recently hosted Sabine Niederer and Gabriele Colombo for a book talk and masterclass on Visual Methods for Digital Research: An Introduction.

For the talk they gave a walkthrough of the book’s chapters on:

• research with images
• distant images: reading large collections
• networked images: platform image analysis
• critical images: exposing inequalities with visual research
• participatory images: talking back to maps
• machine images: generative visual AI for research

For the masterclass they focused on prompt design strategies for critical research with and about generative visual AI, including:

• ambiguous prompting for bias research
• prompting and counter-prompting
• evocative prompting
• provocative prompting
• comparative reverse-engineered prompting
• abstract prompting

We did some hands-on activities on these together - focused on ambiguous prompting (making prompts as generic as possible and studying outputs) and evocative prompting (requesting images to be “more […]”).

I prompted for “more Hakka” and ended up with a landscape densely packed with tulous.