Analysing Social Media Images
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 235126
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- The SAGE Handbook of Social Media
- Publisher
- SAGE
- ISBN
- 9781526486875
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
2
- Research group(s)
-
E - Media
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Although social media platforms are increasingly visual, social media research as a subset of Media as well as Internet Studies still predominantly studies text-based interactions. This original and innovative chapter establishes the need for studying social media images in their own right, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. It introduces a new methodology drawing on quantitative and qualitative approaches using the results of rigorous empirical research. It focuses on Twitter images, further developing research from a ground-breaking rapid response report (Vis and Goriunova, 2015), which took a multi-faceted approach to studying images of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in 2015. Images of his body went viral and caused an international civic response. This chapter is where this new methodology is evidenced; by using a unique dataset of nearly 3 million (firehose) tweets, securing the most complete dataset for the search terms used. Combining methods that work at different scales (from ‘big data’ to small and in depth), the chapter establishes a novel and rigorous way for combining social network analysis (full dataset) and content analysis (100 most shared images), with qualitative methods from Art History for studying individual images in-depth (e.g. the motif of Alan’s body in different settings). It shows how the insight from each method informs the next approach, providing a more complex and detailed reading of the data. This chapter is part of a volume on social media methods, edited by globally leading researchers. As the only chapter to focus on images, to date, the chapter and the report have been cited nearly 130 times and across a number of disciplines. This chapter has the potential to become a standard text and further shape the emergent field of social media research, by significantly contributing to the establishment of a subfield on visual social media research.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -