Metapicturing: Visual media analysis for Instagram and other online platforms
Talk+Workshop
METAPICTURING: VISUAL MEDIA ANALYSIS FOR INSTAGRAM AND OTHER ONLINE PLATFORMS
Richard Rogers, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Discussant: Sara Monaci (DIST), Politecnico di Torino
Facilitator: Simone Persico (DIST), Politecnico di Torino
February, 23: 13:30 - 17:00; Aula Vigliano - DIST
February, 24: 09:00 - 13:00; Aula Vigliano - DIST
Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images (and their analysis), but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the talk+workshop, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures.
At the workshop we will undertake two practical exercises. One analyses a collection of Covid-19 memes in order to explore them in software such as ImageSorter / PicArrange and find dominant images and formats. The other is to compare sets of images of the ‘same’ Wikipedia article but across different languages, exploring cultural specificity, for a topic of your choice, such as climate change or urban space. The outputs of both these exercises are discussed in the reading Rogers, 2021.
Suggested reading:
- Richard Rogers (2021) ”Visual media analysis for Instagram and other online platforms”, Big Data & Society, January–June: 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211022
- Giulia Giorgi, Richard Rogers and Janna Joceli Omena (2022) “How to make meme collections,” SAGE Research: Doing Online Research, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529611267
- Lucia Bainotti and Richard Rogers (2022) "How to Use Visual Media Analysis for Social Media Research," SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529608687
Software:
- ImageSorter / PicArrange: https://visual-computing.com/. Please download and install ImageSorter or PicArrange. Data sets of Covid memes.
- Wikipedia Cross-Lingual Image Analysis: https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/wikipediaCrosslingualImageAnalysis/
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. He is Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, known for the development of software tools for the study of online data. His most recent books are Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2019) and the edited volume (with Sabine Niederer), The Politics of Social Media Manipulation (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). He is currently working on The Propagation of Misinformation across Social Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2023) as well as projects on a technical definition of memes, the art of critical analytics, Yandex-Google comparative image research concerning the Russo-Ukrainian War and problematic narratives concerning Ukrainian refugees in Polish-language social media.
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