Crowdsourced Representation: People’s Drawings of Culture in a Globalized World

Crowdsourced Representation: People’s Drawings of Culture in a Globalized World

Imagery has never been consumed or circulated at the rate and latitude we see today making communication technologies and visually-based inquiry crucial to investigating visual, media and digital literacies that lie within these pictorial exchanges. Conducted over the Internet and with graphics at its heart, this qualitative study aims to help inform visually based literacy/media studies and promote image-based research, re-imagining research methodologies in visual culture, literacy, and art education. Review some of the preliminary findings of this doctoral dissertation that used visual methodologies coupled with image-based research and crowdsourcing technologies to collect drawings from over 61 countries, diverse in geography and culture. New perspectives of the visual-textual relationship, identity and representation in a globalized context were examined, guided by the questions; what tensions emerge between local and global ways of interpretation and meaning construction when participating online? To what degree does visual culture influence or change deeply ingrained ideas specific to geography and culture into normative global ideals? The paper highlights a selection of drawings from around the world that display intercultural representations of the words meal, marriage and home. It also showcases the methods and the technologies that abound and their potential for artistic and academic discovery.