Minor Meditations: Methods in Analysis

Harvard FAS

This methods seminar begins from a provocation: the most analytically decisive operations in media often occur in details that seem too minor to matter—subtitle lag, aspect ratios, interface behaviors, gestures held too long. Students learn to build portable concepts from such details through a structured protocol: identify what "misfits" its apparent context, interpret what that misfit does, form a concept, and test it collaboratively on maximally different objects. The method treats detail…