Adam Poole, John Stewart Clark
Qualitative research in education has relied heavily on interviews and textual analysis, which, whilst valuable, can privilege individual perspectives and overlook the broader, multimodal, institutional and temporal dimensions of identity construction. The rise of online media and the proliferation of digital artefacts offer new opportunities to expand qualitative inquiry by accessing naturally occurring, publicly available data that reflect complex social and cultural processes. Whilst previous research has analysed school websites as static promotional tools, this paper addresses a significant methodological gap: the lack of a diachronic, multimodal framework for understanding how digital identities change over time and for different audiences. To address this, we introduce ‘digital palimpsesting’, a novel approach that moves beyond synchronic ‘snapshots’ to conceptualize websites as layered, temporal artefacts. By integrating the metaphor of the palimpsest with multimodal semiotic analysis, the method examines three interrelated layers (textual, semiotic, and temporal) to show how institutional identities are continuously rewritten in response to shifting sociopolitical contexts. The method captures the linguistic, visual, and historical dimensions of meaning-making embedded in school websites. Focusing on the website of a bilingual international school in China as a case example, our approach foregrounds the dynamic and contested nature of institutional identity as continuously constructed across multiple modes and over time. The digital palimpsest method extends qualitative inquiry beyond elicited accounts to include naturally occurring, multimodal, and time-sensitive digital data that can be used to complement and enhance interview-based research.