Pictures shared on Twitter around the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher will be examined as part of the world’s first academic research project studying the explosion of images now shared across different social media platforms and apps, led by Dr Farida Vis of the Information School. Thanks to smartphones, most people now carry a camera with them at all times and use it to document different aspects of their lives – sharing more than 750 million social media images daily. For the Thatcher research, academics have so far collected nearly 150,000 tweets containing images directly shared on Twitter and have downloaded 17,000 different images. This research can shed light on how a range of different types of images are used on Twitter to express opinions, discuss news and collectively remember well-known people and events. The ‘Picturing the Social’ project is the first to explore the impact images of this kind have on society. This includes images taken during brea...
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