Persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies

Abstract

Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.

Keywords:

• persona studies
• interpretative phenomenological analysis
• network analysis
• visualisation
• visual analysis
• prosopography

Notes

1. We refer to the plural ‘personas’ not ‘personae’, which is typically reserved by dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary (2014), for the members of a dramatic work or the multiple characters inhabited by the author over a series of novels, while ‘personas’ is most often used to refer to the multiple aspects of an individual’s character that are presented and understood by others at certain times and places and in certain roles; a politician, a mother, a celebrity.

2. See Moore (2014) for further discussion of how this approach can be applied to analysing the role of digital objects, specifically screenshots, in presentation of the public self within modes of cultural production and the negotiation of the cybernetic interfaces of games and the affective dimensions of their play.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P. David Marshall

P. David Marshall holds a research professorship and Persona Chair in new media, communication and cultural studies at Deakin University where he is also the convenor of the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP). Co-authored with Moore and Barbour, forthcoming is Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity, and the Transformation of the Public Self (Wiley, 2016).

Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore is a lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. He is a co-editor of Zombies in the Academy (Intellect, 2013) and the forthcoming Enchanting David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2015), and recently published ‘Screenshots as Virtual Photography: Cybernetics, Remediation, and Affect’ in Advancing Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Kim Barbour

Kim Barbour completed her doctorate in 2014 and is a member of the PCP at Deakin University. Kim is a qualitative new media scholar, co-editor of Persona Studies open access journal, and teaches in research methods, communications, media, arts marketing and digital literacy. She recently joined the Department of Media, University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.