<hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="color(#0e101a)">With this complexity in mind, we analyse the capabilities of MLLMs in understanding video content within Taylor Arnold’s and Lauren Tilton’s concept of ‘Distant Viewing’ (Arnold & Tilton, 2023). We used two multimodal MLLMs: the closed-source </hi> <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">GPT-4o mini </hi> <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="color(#0e101a)">from OpenAI (</hi>OpenAI, 2024 <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="color(#0e101a)">) and the open-source</hi> <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic"> Large Language and Vision Assistant</hi> <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="color(#0e101a)"> (LLaVA, </hi>Liu <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="color(#0e101a)">et al., 2023). Both models can process textual and visual data; and while they cannot work directly with the video format, they can produce aggregated descriptions by splitting videos into sequences of frames.</hi>