How to Analyze Poetry Performance on Social Media Platforms: Introducing Researcher Qualities, Methodological Parameters, and Positionality
by MAGDALENA ELISABETH KORECKA, University of Vienna/University of Hamburg
This blog series offers practical guidance for poetry performance researchers navigating the ethical and legal dimensions of social media research. While not exhaustive, it is an invitation to consider the conceptual parameters that shape researcher-to-participant dynamics and the quality of findings. This series is addressed to literary and cultural researchers who are unfamiliar with social science methodology but wish to apply multimodal post-digital ethnography[1] to poetry performance research. It presents a way ‘in’ for academics in the humanities[2] desiring to broaden their scope of study objects as well as the set of methodologies they can draw on. Part One gives a brief overview of the skills and qualities that poetry performance researchers ideally possess, along with a short introduction to post-digital ethnography. Part Two discusses the legal and ethical dimensions of this approach.
This introduction is especially fitting for poetry performance scholars who are considering methodological triangulation, i.e., a mixed-methods approach or a combination of various methods, in their interdisciplinary projects. Within such projects, collaborations with, for instance, speech scientists or IT specialists are possible, or in particular with the discipline of Digital Humanities, which offers scholars quantitative research approaches (big data amassments of poetry collected online and in digitized archives) besides the qualitative and therefore smaller individual case study research in poetry performance archives that this blog series covers. In any configuration – be it in interdisciplinary research teams in a project or in a collective co-edited publication, or a position of consultancy – poetry performance projects greatly benefit from diversifying approaches across disciplinary boundaries.
However, it is also crucial for poetry performance scholars to be aware of certain prerequisites for ethical engagement across disciplines. While there are many points that could be discussed, a short list of qualities that researchers should have or are willing to acquire for these purposes suffices to explicate what to consider as part of the specific research process of multimodal post-digital ethnography.
Three Necessary Skills and Qualities for Poetry Performance Scholars
I now want to emphasize three qualities and associated skills which may prove useful for poetry performance scholars. These are necessary to have and/or to learn before, during, and after the research process. I list three important skills along with some examples.
1. Flexibility
Flexibility as a demand means, for instance, to be willing to acquire or already possess a willingness to stay up to date with media law – which Part Two discusses in detail –, an area of law that is still in its infancy and constantly develops with respect to regulations of the social media space.
A recently introduced and important regulation in the UK is, for example, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 that clearly states how the protection of consumers needs to be guaranteed on social media platforms, including the avoidance of misleading advertising practices.[3] As a part of flexibility, poetry performance scholars analyzing activity on social media ought to get acquainted with such changes, e.g. with newly introduced legal rules. With poets increasingly occupying the space of content creators on socials, some turn to advertising practices to monetize their otherwise free work. This is why researchers ought to be familiar with the fact that ads on Instagram need to be marked accordingly, to name an important case in point. Demarcating advertisements is a legal prerequisite, but the level of immediate visibility differs from post to post; sometimes, only an extensive search into hashtags reveals a post’s nature as an advertisement. Collaborative content posted on two or more profiles usually makes this process easier. Knowledge of such ad logics can thus explain associated hashtags and caption descriptors in addition to explicating how far platform contributions overlap with or are intertwined with poets’ own aesthetic choices – this also changes readings/interpretations. This means that instead of viewing clearly positioned location tags such as tagged cafés in cities, as showcasing a seemingly spontaneous poetic writing process in a specifc place or as additional poetic information, scholars can discern these or other elements as corporate.
Hence, poetry performance researchers of social media ecologies need to work with fast-paced changes specific to the attention economy, through sustained engagement or collaboration (see point 3 below). For instance, researchers may listen to tech-specific podcasts, actively immerse themselves in discussions about digital culture on social media such as on BlueSky, or consume tech-focused media like WIRED or Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures Journal. They may also be involved in either practical usage of social media themselves or closely work together with a team member who is taking on such a role. Poetry scholars can also consult professionals in the field of media law or other academics who are invested in digital culture scholarship and possess specialized knowledgeable about platformized cultural online spheres. Consequentially, improving one’s social media literacy skills on-the-go proves helpful in distinguishing platform features from poets’ creative abilities.
Another instance where it is important to adapt to changes is the introduction – and the potentially rather quick discarding – of platform features that may affect, for instance, reel length or platform policies on political content and visibility. For instance, captions may have a limited word count, so it is important to distinguish between platform constraints and poets’ individual aesthetic choice. Importantly, it matters how a poetry post is in accordance with afforded platforms features, how innovatively it circumvents them, if it includes a platform interventionist groundwork or if it rather adheres to policies in a proprietary way for purposes of visibility. For a holistic understanding of poetry performance on social media, the skill of flexibility is highly relevant when branching out from classical poetry analysis to a more interdisciplinary, social science-inflected approach of study. The effects of media law in this particular context will be discussed in detail in the second part of this blog series.
2. Core Values
When staying true to core principles of the humanities, research of platforms should perform a critical intervention. Otherwise, this research is no more than a lip service to platform capitalism. Critical reflection on platform politics and one’s own positionality are important to consider for an ethical research praxis – one that aims to disclose how specific results have been achieved. These are contingent on asked research questions, and their reflection is a testament to how poetry is studied, i.e. through which lens platform material is examined. It is therefore crucial to contemplate how scientific core values of transparency and self-reflection are present and implemented in research design, as non-negotiable instruments for academically sound research. In practice, this means that scholars should describe the application of their core values in detail. Additionally, poetry performance researchers need to disclose involvement with people/actors and how participants are reimbursed either financially, ideally, or by alternatives if financial compensation is impossible. At the very least, attention can easily be directed to poets’ work. While maintaining critical distance and by inviting nuanced ambiguity, also in academic publication, communication with involved poetry organizers or poets across the board is necessary.
With poetry performance especially, transparency about methodology and its thorough documentation becomes even more important, for instance, when platforms deactivate certain features. Such a turn of events, in fact, influences poetic aesthetics, whether in perception or interpretation. If, for instance, a vertical format is changed to a horizontal one, or if colors look different, aesthetic parameters might shift. When researchers are taking notes of comment sections or of an interview, or when they are talking to poets and are including transcripts as sources, they open possibilities of discussion for readers as well as the wider academic community. In addition, transparency in self-reflective methodological publications yields confirmability for future research, which is a practice that has been long established as a norm of social sciences. Transparency can be a way for archiving a research process in interdisciplinary project publications, too. With such archives, the issue of preserving one’s research process but also, even more significantly, of primary materials, materializes as well.[4]
Researchers should consistently remind themselves of their core values to remain flexible in the face of change. Aside from a set of shared values like transparency and self-reflexiveness, community is paramount to the entire multimodal post-digital ethnography process per se. Thus, the next section explains what collectivity in a research process means and how to achieve it as a poetry performance researcher.
3. Collectivity
This third category refers to a commitment to collectivity by academics. Such a commitment can look like respecting boundaries of how much involved participants like poets or audience members have time for interviews. A collective research approach also involves consistently reflecting on one’s own scientific procedures, which includes being aware of and admitting to mistakes as they are an unavoidable step of learning. In addition, I encourage scholars to consistently remember one’s own and collective ‘why,’ i.e., the purpose of a specific research endeavor.
Also, approaching interdisciplinarity in teams also means recognizing contributions of the many actors involved in research. Knowledge from the fields of communication studies, political sciences, various philologies, digital anthropology, IT and platform studies, art history, media-specific questions as well as poetry discussions can be merged with poetry performance studies. If one wants to pin it down to a sub-field, literary sociology best describes the application of multimodal post-digital ethnography– with its particular interdisciplinary focus. In the spirit of open academic discussion which aims to decenter capitalist scarcity models, working collaboratively in research networks manifests in concrete tangible action such as openly shared resources, for example. In publishing reading lists publicly, through open access or via an open editing system, academics showcase a profound commitment to their academic community. A case in point is the Poetry Off the Page bibliography: It is consistently open to submissions to entries on poetry performance scholarship with a focus on the national context of the UK and Ireland.[5] In general, multimodal post-digital ethnography as a method offers poetry scholars a way to lean into collaboration across disciplines, which is contingent upon a willingness to keep an open mind.
I consider these three abilities prerequisites to carry out multimodal post-digital ethnographic research as a poetry performance scholar. I want to reiterate that these qualities are technical-ethical demands that arise when applying this specific method in practice. Researchers are responsible for a type of poetry performance scholarship that takes media specificity seriously, leading to earnest considerations of spoken word poetry online. Poetry performance on social media, a highly multimodal art form, cannot be understood in its entirety if one does not consider social media ecology’s situatedness. Furthermore, such skills/qualities help researchers to consider ethical and legal parameters of their projects. This is why readers will find examples of such parameters for social media-based poetry performance analyses at the center of the second blog post in this series. For now, however, I will explain which methodological parameters need to be considered.
Methodological Parameters
The basis for practicing multimodal post-digital ethnography in poetry performance analysis and interpretation is an acknowledgment of the fundamental parameters of ethics, legality, the researcher qualities and skills listed above, positionality stances in relation to audiences, institutional anchoring, and media environments. Annette Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan advise the following practices for methodological choices, which are also applicable to multimodal post-digital ethnography:
Ethical decision-making is a deliberative process, and researchers should consult as many people and resources as possible in this process, including fellow researchers, people participating in or familiar with contexts / sites being studied, research review boards, ethics guidelines, published scholarship (within one’s discipline but also in other disciplines), and, where applicable, legal precedent. (208)
Therefore, I aim to anchor the method of multimodal post-digital ethnography as a methodological avenue that considers the proliferation of spoken word videos and poetry performance pieces in audio-visual form on social media platforms. The analysis of such poetic material poses challenges for poetry performance researchers; one of them being ethics, the other legality. This is what digital ethics researcher Annette Markhman and scholar Elizabeth Buchanan mean when they express a necessity for a community of actors in a methodological process in the passage quoted above. This also applies to the methodological practice of scholars based in the humanities, including scholars of poetry performance. The laid-out principles are inflected by my own PhD study approach to social media poetry; with and beyond it, I provide possible methodological directions to explore in poetry performance research.
So, what is multimodal post-digital ethnography? In my own research, I built on digital ethics, media law, marketing research, anthropology, cultural and visual culture studies, platform studies, and communication studies, among other fields to explore like library and information science. My goal has been to study social media poetry as a socio-aesthetically distinct phenomenon. In the course of my research, I have consulted various researchers but also engage with discussions among readers or audience members in comment sections as well as with perspectives by poets in individual interviews.[6] Such a triangulation, i.e. a mixing of methodological approaches, is typical for digital ethnography; it lends itself well to mixedmethods approaches and for collaboration across disciplines. Possible case studies for poetry performance research are analyses of user responses in the comments section of poetry performance videos on a social media platform like YouTube in connection with overall social media profile reviews as well poetry performers’ public image, including public activities such as podcast interviews. Such primary materials are well-fitted to the specific method of multimodal post-digital ethnography; it helps to assess their overall poetic-aesthetic, social, and platform-based significance.
If researchers are considering using multimodal post-digital ethnography, they should be aware of both its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, and with the advantage of a truly interdisciplinary basis and its open form, this method is especially apt for collective research practices. On the other hand and depending on one’s level of familiarity with social science principles, time investment is high and a lot of preparation as well as reflection throughout the research process and afterwards, in writing up findings, is required. Thus, scholars will inevitably gather a huge amount of data, even if their project is not quantitative. An example is data resulting out of social media profile observation in the form of field notes. How individual research steps look depends heavily on research project specifics.
For readers seeking more detailed introductions to digital ethnographic practice, method-focused guides by Sarah Pink and colleagues (“Digital Ethnography”) as well as discussions of methodological discomfort in digital ethnography by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta (“Private messages from the field”), for instance, offer helpful starting points.
In terms of further academic sources, guides on qualitative research explain the how to of methodologies[7] to various degrees, including interviewing (see PoP insider–Claire Palzer’s “three-partite interview series ,” which tackles e.g. ethical questioning on trauma), group settings such as opinion collection in focus groups, and social media based observation of profiles (e.g. Simone Pfeifer’s entry for the DEI, i.e. Digital Ethnography Initiative, at the University of Vienna). In an extension of digital ethnographic work focusing on a plethora of platform contents, this blog’s main focus is poetry performance on social media. In combination with classical close readings, the method of literary studies and critical theory use, an ethnographic focus on social media spaces and their poetic phenomena enhances a holistic understanding of aesthetic, social, ethical, and influential work by performance poets as participants as well as audiences of social media poetry as phenomenon.
Depending on specific research questions and materials, structural set-ups can look completely different. Multimodal post-digital ethnography is highly contextual, meaning that exact practical steps are contingent upon overall research designs and aims. In the following I propose an explanation for the main and continuously relevant parts of the methodological work. Whichever practical route is embarked upon, these are the media ethnographic, the post-digital, and the multimodal aspects of the method.
What connects various academic collectives and projects is exactly the methodological framework of multimodal post-digital ethnography. Through this method, scholars find common ground with multidisciplinary projects that also center a research focus on culturally media-specific issues; in discussing processes of technological self-reflection as well as insightful stances about experiences in terms of knowledge-making, or on the matter of relationships with study participants, bonds across study fields are possible in field-theoretical practices. To carry out such methodological projects, human relationships are important, with a method that is, in general, collective. Hence, poetry performance researchers should – if they are not already doing it – follow scientific values of transparency, which is the basis of establishing trust and serving ethical safeguarding. Funders like the European Research Councileven demand and review ethics requirements in grant applications. They are implying expectations placed on responsibility, accountability, and trust by evaluating how these requirements correspond to planned – implemented – premises in a project (Ávila 2025). Ultimately, ethical realization in scholarly work is contingent upon an honest, respectful, and a collective kind of thinking.
What all methodological approaches of ethnography have in common is the phenomenological lens. An example for phenomenological inquiry is the definition of digital ethnography by a collective of researchers from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Sarah Pink, Heather Hortst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and John Tachi claim that the method’s “starting point” is “the idea that digital media and technologies are part of the everyday and more spectacular worlds that people inhabit” (7). The scholars’ ‘mission statement’ is their interest “in how the digital has become part of the material, sensory and social worlds we inhabit, and what the implications are for ethnographic research practice.” (ibid.). With such a definition of digital ethnography in mind, it becomes clear how post-digitality as a term makes sense when analyzing poetry performance practices on social media. Post-digitality accounts for the enmeshment of ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ approaches, which are closely akin to adaptations of ‘live’ performances to Instagram- or other platform-based streams (see Martina Pfeiler’s published research adaptations of “live performances to streams” online as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic). Other examples of post-digitality are presented by performance bits filmed and later uploaded by poets/fans to YouTube; others, however, are examples of spoken word videos specifically created for social media platforms and/or a proliferation on them. An example is Hollie McNish’s spoken word poetry film “Embarassed” or the poet’s reading series on her Instagram page (see Julia Novak 324 and Novak “No matter how” n.p. ). Additionally, some poets include event recaps on their profiles, which shows how social action extends beyond the confines of platforms. So, a certain reciprocity of the on- and offline is prevalent throughout performance poetries, which the term of post-digitality captures aesthetically, technologically, and socially. On the one hand, the digital influence on how performances are filmed to fit the vertical story format on Instagram, for instance, affects the in-person attendance of a spoken word show – how the seating arrangements are placed in case this is important for organizers; on the other hand, the proliferation of audience participation in the form of clapping or judging in poetry slams, for example, closely correlates with platform afforded features of interaction such as likes, comments, and re-posts. So far, so good – the post-digital and ethnographic work of the method is explained. But what about multimodality?
Audio-visually formatted poetry performance artifacts are, at their core, multimodal, i.e. their form consists of a variety of modalities; these stretch from oral speech and voice modulation to color-focused or nostalgic grain filters added to poetry films. Such “multimodal ensembles” (Jewitt 72–3; see also “multimodal studies’ groundwork” by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen) are uploaded and disseminated via social media application-based feeds. Expanding to poetry post elements beyond the poem proper within such multimodally rich, audio-visually poetic posts, a captions’ purpose, for instance, is often one of an added paratext. It is comparable to and replaces the introductory passages often seen at ‘live’ poetry events preceding performances. This is why poetry performances with its manifold multimodal forms lend themselves perfectly to be studied by multimodal post-digital ethnography. In my own work, multimodal close reading is the term I use to emphasize the depth that multimodality studies bring to examining visual aesthetics. The inclusion of multimodal in the method’s name, particularly, also signifies that audio-visuality alone carries so much meaning that it would be a shame not to take it seriously, even as it is discernible in e.g. seemingly simple emojis (see also Korecka “Platformized,” “Social Media Poetry”).
Besides the ability to grasp certain visual styles and platform influences, the method of multimodal post-digital ethnography allows researchers to examine contributions made by people, hence called research participants and actors.[8] Relationships between poets, readers/audience members, literary critics, organizers as well as MCs and journalists active in tech news segments are such important instances of knowledge creation. If academics want to grasp why poets upload their performances to Instagram, why people comment on such public posts, which topics are discussed, and what role platforms play in all of this, multimodal post-digital[9] ethnography can be a useful method – by way of integrating comment section observations or qualitative interviews with users.
In addition, the already mentioned self-reflection is a core part of the discussed methodology as it helps to see through one’s own biases in terms of technological thinking, perhaps even “algorithmic imaginaries” (see Taina Bucher’s research on “Facebook’s algorithmic imaginaries,” so explanations by users): These are stories of personal experience, cognitive explanations users employ to ‘crack’ the codes of algorithmically curated content in order to remove uncertainty as well as missing knowledge (see also Glatt on “online creators”). Beyond social media use put under scrutiny, one’s own privileges in terms of gender, race, and age, or other subject-based positions, are also necessary conditions of self-reflection, which can be summarized under positionality.
Furthermore, and by going back to the fundamentals, distinctions between methods and methodologies help researchers understand how methodological choices include more than simply choosing an apt research instrument. Methods are tools of application and instruments for the study of phenomena, for which methodology is the method’s argumentative justification. As Pink (“Digital Ethnography,” “Sensory Ethnography,” “Visual Ethnography”) claims in her many publications on digital ethnography, ethnography is not only meant to provide an instrument, but it also includes a rethinking of academic positionality. This means that utilizing multimodal post-digital ethnography for poetry performance research with respect to audience interaction or performative poetry personas online, for instance, includes considerations and recontextualizations of one’s method as such. In having to argue for the use of a specific method, one becomes hyper aware of what it can and cannot do, how to alter it so it fits the remits of a project, its aims, which kind of limitations it has, and more importantly, how all of these steps involve human relationships between researchers and study participants.
Such in-depth engagement in the process of research design, its devising by scholars, contributes to methodological-philosophical debate more broadly. Such reflection should be considered with every research step and contribute to the treatment of participants as agentive subjects with their own set of opinions that influence decision-making in research studies; see, for instance, the concept of informed consent (see practical explanations by Pink “Visual Ethnography,” “Digital Ethnography.”) The American Psychological Association, for instance, defines informed consent as “a person’s voluntary agreement to participate in a procedure on the basis of their understanding of its nature, its potential benefits and possible risks, and available alternatives.” (n.p.) This is the basis for which poetry performance researchers ought to strive, including users’ opinions on their use of data or information (see Beninger 55–73), depending on their private or public status, among other factors pertaining to profiles on TikTok or Instagram (for EU-based researchers, the “Ethics and Data Protection Decision Tree” is a useful tool).[10]
Furthermore, a study’s purpose (why?) is inextricably linked to its manner of obtaining the desired outcome (how?), and it is also intertwined with its target audience/s (for whom?). This interrelated state means that choosing a specific method always carries a set of beliefs with it; for example, belief regarding agentive research participants. This position is also one inherent to data scientist Gustavo Jorge Martins de Aguiar’s statement on the difference of method to methodology: The scholar explicates that “[t]he “method” refers to the specific techniques and procedures used to collect and analyze data, whereas “methodology” encompasses the overall research design, including the theoretical framework, research questions, and the research approach.” (Aguiar 20) Thus, literary studies scholars should be aware of implications that methods and their methodologies carry, e.g. so-called netnographic research has been used in problematic ways for marketing profiling of social media accounts by companies. This is the reason why communication studies experts in as well as outside of corporations make sure to center participant consent in online studies; another case of concern are power dynamics in the research of vulnerable groups, among them minors or those that are unable to provide their own consent, for which high degrees of protection are expected in digital sociology studies (see Vosman, Baart, and Hoffman “Ethics of Care” or Robert V. Kozinets “Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online;” “Netnography Redefined;” “Netnography: An Essential Guide.”)
In an ideal world, legal frameworks always build on ethics. As this is not always the case, researchers need to make informed decisions in methodological processes of studies. If unsure which connotations methods carry, one can consult digital ethnographic collectives such as the UK-based Digital Ethnography Collective founded by Zoë Glatt and Branwen Spector, or the Digital Ethnography Initiative, founded by Philipp Budka, Suzana Jovicic, and Monika Palmberger at the University of Vienna in Austria, or the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in/around Melbourne, Australia, which brings forth methodological, ethnographic development by scholars such as Sarah Pink, Vaike Fors, Debora Lanzeni, Melisa Duque, Shanti Sumartojo, and Yolande Strengers.[11]
Readers should be also mindful of the fact that this and the following blog entry focus on qualitative research methodology as it is presently practiced in social sciences, which can be easily combined with close reading practices of traditional literary studies. Such practice entails small corpora of primary material, of poetry performances and paratextual material found in captions or obtained through situated discussions in comment sections underneath social media posts, among other studied elements.
Positionality and Audience
Now, I would like to draw your attention to my own positionality and professional experience, as they are relevant to this blog entry. As a PhD researcher in literary and cultural/media studies, I have been studying social media poetry since at least 2020, when I began work for my MA thesis on instapoetry (completed: 2021). In the following five years, I worked in the ERC project Poetry in the Digital Age at the University of Hamburg (PI: Prof. Dr. Claudia Benthien) and in the FWF/ERC project Poetry Off the Page at the University of Vienna (PI: Assoz.-Prof. Dr. Julia Novak). Throughout these years, I have expanded my interdisciplinary thinking by taking on a PhD project[12] that tackles socially formed aesthetic practices of multilingual instapoetry in Polish, English, and German, and by looking at instapoetic media-specific art through a materially informed feminist lens. This is the position from which I am writing this blog article and the experience I can share. Through co-constitute knowledge formation within the network collective that DLC + / Digital LiteraryCultures+[13] provides, I aim for collaboration across disciplines. Additionally, science communication activities in the form of social media outreach for academia have also informed my professional practice and I have co-developed multiple social media series, such as Why Poetry?[14] and The Poetic Pause.[15] With some poetic participants, I share more identity traits – like growing up bilingually or a gender identity – while there are fewer commonalties with others. In any case, treating people with empathy and respect is a prerequisite to being able to carry out this type of work at a high degree of ethical commitment, to which I continuously aspire.
Besides such provisions as well as preparations in the form of the necessary skills for multimodal post-digital ethnography presented above (flexibility, adherence to core values as well as collectivity), this blog entry’s intervention is largely methodological. With a specific focus on directives for poetry performance researchers, I have included basic sources on various types of ethnography (e.g. digitalormultimodal) and explained how framing in terms of positionality as well as audience relationality can improve research design and its application in practice.
In addition, legality matters when collecting performance poetry information for analysis, whether in the form of profile data gathering of spoken word poets’ pages on Instagram or via re-visited public statements as well as offline performances or online posted poetic materials provided by poets and audience members. This is why I will introduce core legal principles that scholars should know when deciding to use multimodal post-digital ethnography as a method in the next blog article. In it, readers will be informed about legal matters very soon, so stay up-to-date with Poetry Off the Page!
***
Magdalena Elisabeth Korecka is a PhD researcher and Poetry Off the Page’s former junior research associate. Her PhD project investigates so-called ‘instapoetry’ and originates from her work in the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age” at the University of Hamburg. Its core is the examination of this social media-based poetic phenomenon – in its localized, English, Polish, and German versions – through the methodological lens of multimodal post-digital ethnography. Hereby, a media-critical framework of platformization is combined with the analysis of audio-visual aesthetics in a variety of socially engaged, i.e. feminist, poetic pieces. With degrees in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and Journalism and Communication Science (University of Vienna/ University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht), her research interests combine post-digital socio-poetics with methodological and ethical implications of researching them. Further aspects of post-digital literary culture are discussed and dissected at events that she had the pleasure to co-organize, e.g. the conference Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur (2022) and its subsequent co-edited publication (w. Dr. Wiebke Vorrath; De Gruyter, 2023). Moreover, she regards openly shared knowledge discussion as a core pillar of strong scientific practice, not only in teaching but also in collaborative endeavors, incl. in the network Digital Literary Cultures + or in journalistic publications such as 54 books, Metropole Magazine.
***
To cite this blog post: Korecka, Magdalena Elisabeth. “Multimodal Post-Digital Ethnography: Researcher Qualities, Ethical Concepts, and Legal Challenges in Research Praxis (Part I).” Poetry Off the Page, 21 July 2026, https://poetryoffthepage.net/multimodal-post-digital-ethnography-researcher-qualities-ethical-concepts-and-legal-challenges-in-research-praxis-part-i/.
***
Works Cited
All links have been accessed last in May 2026.
Abidin, Crystal, and Gabriele Seta. “Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts.” Journal of Digital Social Research vol 2, no 1, 2020, pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v2i1.35.
Aguiar, Gustavo Jorge Martins de. “Distinguishing between Method and Methodology in Academic Research.” SSRN (Social Science Research Network), 2024, pp.1-4, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4857923.
American Psychological Association. “Informed Consent.” 15 November 2023, https://dictionary.apa.org/informed-consent.
Ávila, Carolina C. “Ethics requirements in your ERC application.” The European Research Council, 6 March 2025, https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-03/Guidance_on_Research_Ethics_requirements.pdf.
Beninger, Kelsey. “Social Media Users’ Views on the Ethics of Social Media Research.” The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, ed. Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase, SAGE Publications, 2017, pp. 57–73.
Bowen, Jonathan P., Suzane Keene, and Kia Ng. eds. Electronic Visualization in Arts and Culture. Springer, 2013.
Bucher, Taina. If…Then. Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Conway, Lorraine. “Regulation of advertising in the UK.” House of Commons Library, 24 June 2025, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06130/SN06130.pdf.
Cramer, Florian. “What Is Postdigital?”. APRJA vol. 3, no.1, 2014, pp. 10–24.
DEI / Digital Ethnography Initiative, ed. Philipp Budka, Suzana Jovicic, and Monika Palmberger, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria, 2026, https://digitalethnography.at/.
Digital Ethnography Collective, ed. Zoë Glatt et. al., 2026, the UK, https://zoeglatt.com/?page_id=545.
DLC+ / Digital Literary Cultures +, ed. Tanja Grubnic, Camilla Holm Soelseth, Kiera Obbard, Hannah Jorgensen, and Magdalena E. Korecka, 2026, https://dlcplus.org.
Elliott, Kevin C. “A Taxonomy of Transparency in Science.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2022; vol. 52, no. 3, 2022, pp. 342–355. doi:10.1017/can.2020.21.
Emerging Technologies Research Lab, ed. Sarah Pink, Vaike Fors, Debora Lanzeni, Melisa Duque, Shanti Sumartojo, and Yolande Strengers, 2026, Monash University, Australia, https://www.monash.edu/emerging-tech-research-lab/research/research-themes/research-methods.
European Union. “Ethics and Data Protection Decision Tree.” https://ec.europa.eu/assets/rtd/ethics-data-protection-decision-tree/index.html, 2026.
Glatt, Zoë. The Digital Ethnography Collective Reading List, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RaFQdQFdijQs6eQ_UlZRBuF30oD80uvisDyJXFjwuzw/edit?tab=t.0, July 2025–ongoing.
Glatt, Zoë. “Precarity, discrimination, and (in)visibility. An Ethnography of “The Algorithm” in the YouTube Influencer Industry.” The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology, eds. Elisabetta Costa, Particia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolyna Sinanan, Routledge, 2022, pp. 544–556.
Hennink, Monique, Inge Hutter, and Ajay Bailey. Qualitative Research Methods. SAGE Publications, 2020.
Jewitt, Carey, “4 Multimodal analysis.” The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, eds. Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spilloti. Routledge 2015, pp. 69–84.
Korecka, Magdalena Elisabeth. “Social Media Poetry.” Poetry in the Digital Age. An Interdisciplinary Handbook. De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 227–238, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111704548.
—. “Platformized Visual Intimacies. Visibility in Feminist Instapoetry.” Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur, edited by Wiebke Vorrath and Magdalena E. Korecka, De Gruyter, 2023, pp. 121–144.
—. Instagram Poetry as a Site of Empowerment. Advocating Equality, Anti-Racism, and Mental Health Awareness. Unpublished Master Thesis, 2021, University of Vienna.
Kozinets, Robert V. Netnography. An Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research. 3rd ed. SAGE Publications, 2020.
Kozinets, Robert V. Netnography: Redefined, 2nd ed. SAGE Publications, 2015.
Kozinets, Robert V. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Sage Publications, 2010.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2010.
Lajta-Novak, Julia. “No matter how embarrassed I feel as she sips. Autobiographical Spoken Word as Feminist Activism.” 4genderstudies initiative, Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, 8 December 2021, https://anglistik.univie.ac.at/news-events/4genderstudies/lajta-novak-4genderstudies/.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199256044.001.0001.
Markham, Annette and Elizabeth Buchanan. “14. Research Ethics in Context. Decision-Making in Digital Research.” The Datafied Society. Studying Culture Through Data, eds. Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es 2025, pp. 201–209, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462987173.
Novak, Julia. “Performing Black British Memory: Kat François’s spoken-word show Raising Lazarus as embodied auto/biography.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 56, no. 3, 2020, pp. 324–341, doi:10.1080/17449855.2020.1737184.
Palzer, Claire. “Implementing the Poetry Off the Page Interviews.” Poetry Off the Page, 03 July 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/implementing-the-poetry-off-the-page-interviews/.
Palzer, Claire. “Developing the Poetry Off the Page Interviews.” Poetry Off the Page, 08 May 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/developing-the-poetry-off-the-page-interviews/.
Palzer, Claire. “The Role of Interviewing in Poetry Performance Research.” Poetry Off the Page, 1 Feb 2024, https://poetryoffthepage.univie.ac.at/the-role-of-interviews-in-poetry-performance-research.
Pfeifer, Simone. “How Can You Approach the Field Digitally? Reflections on Using Social Media Profiles in Ethnographic Research.” Digital Ethnography Initiative Blog, 29 April 2021, https://digitalethnography.at/how-can-you-approach-the-field-digitally-reflections-on-using-social-media-profiles-in-ethnographic-research/.
Pfeiler, Martina. “Popularisierung von Lyrik: Punk-Lyrik, Pop-Ästhetik und Live-Streaming von Poetry Slams im Vereinigten Königreich.” Audioliterary Poetry Between Performance and Mediatization / Audioliterale Lyrik zwischen Performance und Mediatisierung, ed. Marc Matter, Henrik Wehmeier, and Clara Cosima Wolff. De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 215–234, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111561356-011.
Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. Digital Ethnography. Principles and Practice. Sage Publications, 2016.
Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. SAGE Publications, 2015.
Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. 2nd ed. SAGE Publications, 2007.
Poetry in the Digital Age, ERC Advanced Grant. “Research.” University of Hamburg, 2021–2025, https://www.poetry-digital-age.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung.html.
Przybylski, Liz. Hybrid Ethnography. Online, Offline and In Between. SAGE Publications, 2021.
Saum-Pascual, Alex. “Is Third Generation Literature Postweb Literature? And Why Should We Care?” Electronic Book Review, 3 May 2020, https://doi.org/10.7273/60pg-1574.
Vosman, Frans, Andries Baart, and Jaco Hofman. Ethics of Care. State of the Art. Peeters Publishers, 2020.
[1]With the term post-digital, i.e. poetry that unfolds across digital/online and non-digital/offline spaces, I follow Florian Cramer’s proposition of post-digitality as a sensibility of contemporary aesthetics, based on my doctoral study on instapoetry (see Cramer “post-digitality;” see also Alex Saum-Pascual’s similar “post web.”)
[2]While the target audience of the blog is in academia, interested poets, curators, organizers, and audience members might also profit from understanding practical implications of multimodal post-digital ethnography.
[3]See research briefings of the UK House of Commons Library published in June 2025 – by Lorraine Conway: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06130/SN06130.pdf.
[4]This has been visible with ELO’s, thus the Electronic Literature Organization’s, archive of e-literature called ELA https://eliterature.org/electronic-literature-archives/, or Poetry Off the Page’s project partners at Spoken Word Archive, a collaboration with the UK poetry organizer Apples and Snakes, see https://www.spokenwordarchive.org.uk.
[5]See https://poetryoffthepage.net/project-bibliography/.
[6]This blog post builds upon my PhD project, for which I chose to follow a multiple-step methodological approach that will be discussed in a soon-to-be published book. For it, I specifically chose the term multimodalpost-digital ethnography as an extension of digital ethnographic methodology to instapoetic media art and instapoetry.
[7]For additional information, readers are advised to consult handbooks such as Monique Hennink’s, Inge Hutter’s, and Ajay Bailey’s Qualitative Research Methods for an overview on possible research design and for various types of toolkits such as codebooks or guides on field note–taking (for quantitative instruments like software program uses for scalable data visualizations see e.g. Jonathan Bowen and others).
[8]I borrow this term from ANT, that is Actor-Network-Theory by sociologist Bruno Latour (“Reassembling the Social.”)
[9]A methodological inclusion of online and offline spaces is also present in Liz Przybylski’s Hybrid Ethnography.
[10]See https://ec.europa.eu/assets/rtd/ethics-data-protection-decision-tree/index.html.
[11]See Digital Ethnography Collective: https://zoeglatt.com/?page_id=545; Digital Ethnography Initiative: https://digitalethnography.at;Emerging Technologies Research Lab: https://www.monash.edu/emerging-tech-research-lab/research/research-themes/research-methods.
[12]https://www.poetry-digital-age.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung/laufend/social-media-poetry.html (abstract).
[13]See https://dlcplus.org with Tanja Grubnic, Camilla Holm Soelseth, Kiera Obbard, and Hannah Jorgensen.
[14]See https://www.instagram.com/ercpoetryda/reels/.
[15]See https://www.instagram.com/poetry_offthe_page/reels/.