Using multimodal and narrative approaches to study food blogs: Stories about food, mothering and fathering

Principal Investigator: Gunther Kress (MODE)
Co-investigators: Carey Jewitt (MODE), Rebecca O’Connell (NOVELLA), Corinne Squire (NOVELLA)

This collaborative project is addresses the questions:

• What are the methodological potentials and constraints of doing multimodal narrative analysis of blogs?
• What stories are told in UK based food blogs?

This project builds on strong methodological synergies between MODE and NOVELLA nodes. The project aims to compare and combine multimodal and narrative frameworks for analyzing blogs, and to examine the role of food and the construction of mothering and fathering in online visual and textual narratives about feeding families.

Blogs are a contemporary digital platform widely kept and read across different social and cultural groups for a wide range of different purposes. There are significant practical and methodological challenges in empirical research of ephemeral digital material, of which blogs are an excellent example. Despite their importance in contemporary communication such materials remain under-researched. Food blogs are a potential source of information for policy making in public health, but there are no apt frameworks of analysis to harness this potential.

The project will inform how blogs and other social media are exploited and enhance understanding of human interaction on the Internet in the context of participation in contemporary communication, health and parenting. The project will also explore the implications of the findings for health policies in the UK.