Together with a small group of collaborators, professor of Designanthropologie Andrew Gilbert has just published Multimodal Appreciation: A Kit for Evaluating Multimodal Works in Anthropology and Beyond.  It is the major outcome of a research project, generously funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung and located at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin.  The main project participants were Judith Albrect, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert and Carla J Maier.  The designer of the kit was Dina Fluck.

The project focused on a key challenge in anthropology after the turn to multimodal forms and formats of research, namely, that even as we have witnessed a proliferation of more-than-textual works (games, comics, performance, podcasts, sonic essays, film/video, digital platforms, installation and exhibits of all kinds), they are rarely seen in academia as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. This is in part because peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate or assess such multimodal singularities? This kit responds by providing a set of ¬ practical exercises and a framework for valuing and assessing multimodal works in anthropology and beyond.

For more information about the project, or to download the digital version of the kit, you can visit the project website here: https://www2.hu-berlin.de/multimodalappreciation/  For a physical copy of the kit, send an email to: ed.ellah-grub@treblig.werdna