What is Visual Cliché

To capture what some of the “Global South”-tagged social messages are in early 2019, an image set of 1000+ images was scraped from Flickr and another 500+ images from Google Images and dozens of fairly recent (past few years) videos were identified on YouTube (with their available closed captioning transcripts captured). These mostly decontextualized digital visual contents (still and motion) were coded with bottom-up coding, based on grounded theory, and some initial insights were created about the multi-dimensional messaging. These contents were generated by conference organizers, alternate and foreign news sites, university lecturers, and the mass public, so the messaging is comprised of both formal and informal messaging, information from news channels, and responses to news channels. This work discusses some of the manual and computation-based coding techniques and some initial findings.