Picturing the Arctic: digital imagery and the prospect of using search engines to collect data for interpretative political research

ABSTRACT

Imagery frames reality, and political actors tell stories using images. In an increasingly digital communication landscape, political actors tell visual stories directly on websites or social media channels. This online shift places digital imagery centrally in how we picture political issues, events, and places. Digital images are mobile, circulable and appropriable, which means images are not fused to their immediately surrounding text. Telling a story with digital imagery constitutes a contribution toward a wider digital visual discourse, enabled by circulation. Interpretivist research lacks tools to unpack this digital visual discourse. This article critically evaluates a technique to tap into digital visual discourse using semi-automated data collection utilising search engines. Such data collection tools can divorce imagery from its immediately surrounding text and create a corpus that allows us to identify a digital visual discourse around a given topic. I draw on an attempt at scraping search engines to this end, studying how actors portray the Arctic. The technique is presented transparently with a call to engage with the tool, to spur methodological debates and innovation. Search engine scraping can, in the right research design and if applied critically, illuminate new dimensions of discourse by prying apart written text and imagery.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital visual discourse
• data collection
• search engines
• Arctic

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants at the panel on micropolitics at the 2020 ECPR General Conference and the 2021 German Political Science Association’s conference on Challenges to Comparative Politics, for interesting and pertinent discussions. Thanks also to Katja Freistein, Kristin Annabel Eggeling, Stephan Klose and Sebastian Oberthür, as well as two anonymous referees, for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This immediacy, distinct from text, has resulted in a literature emphasising spectacular, tragic and controversial imagery (Campbell 2004, 2007; Campbell and Shapiro 2007; Euben 2017; Friis 2018; Heck and Schlag 2013; Mortensen 2015, 2017; Wilmott 2017).

2 The study was carried out in 2019. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the tone has changed.

3 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this important point, which shows both the difficulty posed by researchers’ own immersion in a textual culture and the extent to which we can pry channels of discourse apart.

4 I am grateful to Kristin Annabel Eggeling for this perspective on perspectives.