Over the last decade or so, social media influencers have had an enormous impact on businesses in various sectors. Many social media influencers communicate their persuasive messages through a combination of language, embodied resources as well as potentially other semiotic systems.  In this interactive workshop, I guide participants in identifying researchable topics in social media influencers’ videos.  After briefly covering both practical and ethical considerations in collecting video data, I introduce participants to a framework developed specifically for annotating and analyzing video data (Norris, 2019). Although our practice session will focus on TikTok videos from one popular U.S. food influencer, workshop participants are invited to bring in and share 1-2 representative videos from a social media influencer who they follow, or who they may be interested in for research purposes.  At the end of the workshop, participants will be encouraged to share their questions, reflections and observations about the benefits and limitations of Norris’s multimodal framework.

Norris, S. (2019). Systematically Working with Multimodal Data: Research Methods in           Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Wiley.