TRAVIS: Trust and Visuality: Trust in Everyday Digital Images

21世纪第二个十年的特点是严重的信任和合法性危机。我们需要恢复信任，要做到这一点，我们需要更好地理解信任。特拉维斯的出发点是，信任对于国家范围内外的社会关系的运作至关重要。虽然现有的工作主要是将信任作为人与人之间关系的组成部分进行讨论，但由于我们越来越依赖在线交流，对信任的充分理解变得非常复杂，在这种情况下，其他自主人类的意图、承诺甚至存在都必须从屏幕上展开的表现中推断出来。这些表示越来越多地以受算法影响的顺序显示，这些算法旨在最大限度地提高参与度、音量、覆盖面和声音份额。这些指标不一定能产生值得信赖的互动，也不一定能产生多方面的公共领域，但往往会放大增加不确定性或根本不可信的材料。TRAVIS将在两个相互关联的领域研究视觉数字信任的实践，这两个领域是信任日常行为的核心，几乎无处不在的数字化，高度视觉化，与我们所有人都存在相关性：健康和新闻。具体来说，我们关注健康新闻和社交媒体健康传播。在持续的大流行的过去两年里，它们对信任问题的中心地位以及这种中心地位的社会影响得到了突出体现——covid-19统计数据的可视化、感染率的图形以及重症监护工作人员和目睹巨大社会挑战的人的个人故事，已经融入了我们的日常媒体程序。当然，与我们个人和集体的健康经历相关的视觉数字表现形式以前就已经成为我们生活的核心——我们制作并分享了令人自豪的计步器截图，分享了关于朋友切除乳房的悲伤instagram帖子，分享了关于吸烟的表情包中可怕的黑肺图片。卫生环境中的视觉表现有可能在公共和亲密环境中对我们个人和集体产生影响、提供信息、规训和增强能力。但是，这些潜力是否以及如何发挥，与信任问题密切相关。我们将通过研究社交媒体上的视觉健康传播和数字新闻中四个不同文化背景下（奥地利、爱沙尼亚、芬兰和英国）健康主题的可视化，从而结合北欧、东欧/后苏联、盎格鲁-撒克逊和日耳曼文化的观点，每个文化都有自己的传统和信任规范，从而建立对图像的信任。我们的项目分为三个阶段，将使用一系列深入的定性方法：-在我们的研究的第一阶段，我们将重点放在观众的现场-委托人，以及他们通过关注他们如何消费和与健康视觉互动来信任的做法。这可以让我们深入了解观众对内容创造者（例如机构与影响者）、分享和传播内容的人、内容本身的特征、软件和硬件的推断影响等方面的看法。-在第二阶段，我们将注意力转移到生产现场-受托人，以及他们通过制作和分享健康视觉效果而获得信任的做法：我们的方法再次纳入了对人和机构内容生产者的表现、状况、经验和技能的研究。-最后，在第三阶段，我们将重点关注可视化网站及其平台，以了解平台是如何构建的，公司拥有的结构如何塑造信任实践。我们追踪这三个阶段的循环模式。我们将与我们的非学术合作者一起完善我们的问题，并开发有效的途径来分享我们关于如何在不同的数字视觉环境中产生不同类型的信任的发现。

The second decade of the 21st century has been characterized by a deep crisis of trust and legitimacy. We need to recuperate trust, and to do so we need to understand it better. TRAVIS starts from the premise that trust is crucial for functioning social relations within and outside of national spheres. Whereas existing work predominantly discusses trust as integral for human-to-human relationships, an adequate understanding of trust is significantly complicated by our increasing reliance on online communication, where the intentions, commitments and even existence of other autonomous humans has to be inferred from representations unfolding on screens. These representations are increasingly shown in sequences influenced by algorithms intended to maximise engagement, volume, reach and share of voice. These metrics do not necessarily yield trustworthy interactions, or a multifaceted public sphere, but tend to amplify material that increases uncertainty or simply cannot be trusted.TRAVIS will study practices of visual digital trust in two interrelated fields that are central to everyday enactments of trust, near ubiquitously digital, heavily visual, and existentially relevant to all of us: health and news. Specifically, we look at health news and social media health communication. Their centrality to questions of trust and the social implications of that centrality has been highlighted in the last two years of the ongoing pandemic - data visualizations of covid-19 statistics, graphics of the infection rates and personal stories by people both working in intensive care and those witnessing the immense societal challenges have merged in our daily media routines. Of course, visual digital representations related to our individual and collective experiences of health were central to our life already before - we produced and shared proud screenshots of step-counters, sad Instagram-posts about a friend's mastectomy, scary pictures of the black lung in the meme about smoking. Visual representations in health contexts have the potential to affect and inform, to discipline and empower us, individually and collectively, in both public and intimate contexts. But if and how these potentials are enacted, is closely related to questions of trust. We will how trust in images is enacted by studying visual health communication on social media and visualization of health topics within digital news in four different cultural contexts - Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK, thus combining perspectives from Nordic, Eastern-European/Post-Soviet, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultures, each with their own traditions and norms of trust. Our three-stage project will use a range of in-depth qualitative methods:- In the first phase of our research, we focus on the site of the audience - the trustors, and their practices of trusting by focusing on how they consume and interact with health visuals. This allows insight into the role of audience perceptions of the content creator (e.g. institutions vs influencers), those sharing and circulating content, the characteristics of the content itself, the inferred impact of software and hardware. - In the second phase, we shift our attention to the site of production - the trustees, and their practices of trustworthiness through the production and sharing of health visuals: again, our approach incorporates study of the performance, statuses, experiences and skills of human and institutional content producers. - Finally, in the third phase, we will focus on the site of the visuals and their platforms, in order to understand how the platforms as built, corporately owned structures shape trust practices. We trace circulation patterns in all three phases. We will work with our non-academic collaborators to refine our questions and to develop effective pathways to sharing our findings about how to engender different kinds of trust in different digital visual contexts.