Analyzing layering in textual design: a multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video

This paper explores the nature of layering noisy and moving features in video to better understand how the movement of people, their ideas, and their texts are shifting functions of design and circulation within digital contexts. Drawing from video collected as part of an ethnography of digital literacies in urban contexts, features of textual design in a music video will be examined to demonstrate how youth today produce and circulate digital products as an expression of their diverse social identities. I sketch an approach for analyzing design as embedded in the layering of image, language, gesture, color, visual, and sound effects in a participant’s music video.