The Crowdsourced Archive: Mobile Media, Photography, and the Local(ized) Frame

Abstract

As mobile devices have proliferated, so too have the number of images that attempt to document a sense of place. These images are contributing to a growing visual database of how individuals see a region or a location. In this presentation, I will discuss how mobile devices are transforming our relationship to the archival image. As a case study, I will explore images of Appalachia circulated through social media. The visual encoding of Appalachia has tended to reinforce and recirculate images of a rugged, yet pristine landscape, and a people who are portrayed in equal mixtures of pride and deprivation, perseverance and lack. A simple Google image search of “Appalachian photography” reveals the limited scope of these visual stereotypes. At the same time, the casual data structures for this growing archive (hashtags and key word searches) highlight what Judith Butler has called the “frames of recognition” that have defined the region—what they include as well as what they exclude. In this context, I will discuss Roger May’s Looking at Appalachia, a “crowdsourced image archive” of over four hundred photographs taken by some one hundred professional and amateur photographers that forces its viewers to question what we see when we look at images of the region. I will argue that social media photography, as a highly situated everyday media art practice, provides an opportunity for a range of digital humanities projects that seek to collect, preserve, query, and re-use visual representations of regional culture, local histories, and a sense of place.