Computer-mediated representations: a qualitative examination of algorithmic vision and visual style - TJ Thomson, 2025 To the general public, text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, seem to work through magic and, indeed, their inner workings are often frustrati...

🔗 The open-access study can be read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🙏 Thanks to @nataliialaba.com for inspiring this study and to she and @neous.bsky.social for organising a panel on visual style that we presented at #ADDA5 and that helped sharpen my arguments in this paper.

Head of Plural represents Tampere University in Tilburg | Plural-blogi | Tampere Universities Summer is over, and it is now time we looked back at the exciting conferences and research events the pluralists attended in the spring term and over the summer. In a series of blog posts, our colleag...

Many thanks to our @pluraltampere.bsky.social social media queen Olga Andreevskikh for publishing the many conference reports from this summer. Among them, my trip to Tilburg for #ADDA5: blogs.tuni.fi/plural/tutki...

Our colleagues are back from all conferences with many interesting ideas 👏🏼

@sanchoanae.bsky.social has arrived from #ADDA5 with much valuable feedback on her PhD project!

As for the #ALT8 talks, here are some 📸🧵

Dawn, Dasha, Sofia & Frazer

Goodbye, Tilburg, and thank you to the organizers for a fantastic #ADDA5!
Look at those happy panel organizers 😊 @coocho.bsky.social, @nounfraze.bsky.social & Dawn Archer

Ppt slide mimicking a postcard from Brno

Pool party in Brno

#ADDA5 ended with a very tempting invitation to #ADDA6 in Brno 🤩

Two piles of hot dogs

Next up: the #ADDA5 hot dog eating contest #CarnivalesqueConsumption #LanguageAndFood

Last day of #ADDA5: #dcmjournal co-EiC Jan Chovanec on replatforming of TV cooking shows; social media editor @laurafilardollamas.bsky.social on Goncharov CoP on Tumblr; and EB member @jaimackenzie.bsky.social on #dadlife on instagram

@rikithompson.bsky.social examines dating in the sexual borderlands: spaces which are characterized by fluidity and transition (like the border regions between Belgium and the Netherlands) #ADDA5

Took a bit of a break from posting on Bluesky today but have now ofc joined Jan Chovanec's talk on food & the reclamation of authenticity in regional Czech cooking shows. Close entanglements of cooking & nostalgia, focus on honesty & the "nonna phenomenon". Fortunately right before lunch ;) #ADDA5

Day 2 at #ADDA5: Enjoyed talks by members of the #dcmjournal community. Assoc. Editor Göran Eriksson on mental health app discourses, former Assoc. Editor Camilla Vasquez on TikTok food influencers’ multimodal practices, and Ed Board member Alexandra Georgakopoulou on short-form video storytelling.

Amazing work by @nounfraze.bsky.social, Dawn Archer & Paul Archer on how children think about digital influencers and who influences them on- and offline #ADDA5

Comment sections of posts by manosphere influencers serve as hotbed for hate speech & extreme views, with comments serving primarily rapport enhancement functions. @domini.bsky.social presents on the negative side of influencing at #ADDA5

We're already on talk #3 in the "Influencer Discourse" panel at #ADDA5! Hanna Limatius (from the @languaging-crises.bsky.social project) is showing us how beauty influencers and authorities collaborated during the Covid-19 pandemic and how this was received by their audiences.

how do 'medical gurus' construct persuasive discourse in digital spaces: Cecilia Lazzaretti on the 'medical medium', with reference to anti-vegan activists and mortality experts. Discovering a completely new world at #ADDA5

4⃣🗣️ Paula Wood Borque: A multimodal analysis of films and series for English as a foreign language teaching

Find more information on both conferences here:
➡️ #ADDA5: www.diggitmagazine.com/adda-5
➡️ #ALT8: alt8.fil.bg.ac.rs

Exciting days of research dissemination ahead! 🔍✨

First, our pre-doctoral researcher @sanchoanae.bsky.social‬ is at the #ADDA5 conference to share her study on how influencer practices might shape expert physiotherapy discourse on Instagram.
📅 Friday, May 23
📍 @tilburg-university.bsky.social ‪

🧵

Ppt projected on a screen "Algorithms of Aspiration vs Algorithms of Oppression

Optimism instead of pessimism: Payal Arora with inspiring "Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech". The first keynote of day 2 at #ADDA5

PPT Slide Panel 1: Influencer Discourse

Panel schedule

Day 2 of #ADDA5 is about to start! Join us for Panel 1 "Influencer Discourse: Navigating the Spectrum from Positive to Negative Impact" which runs across the full day! Organized with @coocho.bsky.social @nounfraze.bsky.social & Dawn Archer. #InfluencerDiscourse #DigitalDiscourseAnalysis

Really nice talk today by @carmen-lee.bsky.social at #ADDA5. Fascinating description of how memetic aggression is reinforced on online fora vía a combination of affordances, specific subcultures & strategies of normalization. Interesting how similar things happen in different geographic contexts!

Glas on a menu

Sunset viewed through the leaves of a tree

Ending the first day of #ADDA5 at the brewery followed by nibbles on the patio of my accommodation. See you back tomorrow!

First results have just been published here: utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/... (paywalled though it seems) #ADDA5

We've all seen (work on) restaurant reviews, but Melike Akay's research focuses on reviews of quite a different service: hospitals 🏥 I do certainly check the reviews before going to a new doctor's office but then often you don't have a choice in the German system... #ADDA5

Eva Triebl continues with a study on venting on Reddit where she takes a closer look at moments of metapragmatic crisis - instances where we find discursive struggle over who can participate in online interactions, how and under what conditions #ADDA5

Morana Lukač & Stacey Copeland kick off the panel on mental health discourses online with an analysis of podcasts on narcissistic abuse and how therapeutic intimacy functions as a product #ADDA5

Schneider identified "helper tropes" in interviews with & publications by LLM designers: helping people as the goal, "no language left behind" . A similar framing to what was also used in contexts of colonization (full circle with the idea that language functions as a companion for empire). #ADDA5

Schneider: Standardized writing is an important precondition for LLMs, which are often trained with data written for a specific algorithm in the first place: i.e. online texts produced with search engine optimization in mind #ADDA5

Ppt title slide

First keynote of #ADDA5: Britta Schneider on "Large Language Models as Assemblages of Digital Empire – Insights from Language Ideologies in Technology Design and Perception"

Arrived at #ADDA5, looking forward to some great presentations and panels on digital discourse ✨

Tom van Hout on stage

The Mindlabs building

And we're off! Tom van Hout just opened #ADDA5 with a call to heed our responsibilities as researchers engaged in discourse analysis: integrity of work, citations ethics, critical care for participants and readers of our work, accessibility of our results!

Starting slide for my talk on Midjourney sref styles

On my way to #ADDA5 starting later today in Tilburg.
Our panel on style in and of AI-generated images, organised by @nataliialaba.com, @tjthomson.bsky.social and me starts right after the keynote. Exciting!

My own talk will be about --sref style codes on Midjourney.