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 breaking news events and more
everyday snaps like ‘selfies’ and friend photography.
As part of
their wider inquiry, researchers will carry out a series of smaller projects
focusing on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine.
Dr Vis said:
“Images tend to be trickier to study than words. With the rise in techniques
that focus on large volumes of text, specifically with the growing interest in
so-called ‘Big Data’, images tend to get forgotten. They are not easy to ‘mine’
for content and even harder to interpret.”
The
research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will
involve an interdisciplinary team from four universities as well as industry
with expertise in: Media and Communication Studies (University of Sheffield),
Visual Culture (Manchester School of Art), Software Studies and Sociology
(Warwick University), Computer and Information Science (Pulsar and University
of Wolverhampton).
A key aim of
the project is to use the insight from both academia and industry to build a
free research tool for the academic community – work which will be led by
Professor Mike Thelwall, Head of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at
the University of Wolverhampton.
The tool
will allow researchers to capture this visual data to highlight and study
different aspects. This will include the popularity of different kinds of
images, who shares these, how quickly they spread, how they’re tagged, may
include location data as well as look more closely at how images are discussed
and appropriated.
A new Visual
Social Media Lab will officially launch in September, which will work with a
number of different stakeholders, including the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
Dr Vis said:
“What we see in industry is that there is a huge surge of interest in social
media images.
“You see a
lot of new apps, new companies and tools developing in this space. People are
really interested in, for example, what users are doing with brands. From a
research perspective a key issue that is raised over and over – and rightly so
– is concern over ethics and privacy.
“What social
media companies, marketers and researchers do with these images is important in
the context of ethics. I feel that social media users themselves are often left
out of these discussions, which is unhelpful and we hope to change that.”
Sian Thomas,
Head of Analytics at the FSA, said: “We are delighted to be working in
partnership with the University of Sheffield on this exciting initiative to
better understand the opportunities of Big Data for government, and how it might
contribute to evidence-based policy making.”
Dr Olga
Goriunova, from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick
University, said: “Being able to understand our contemporary condition means
being able to draw upon computer science, design, social, media and art theory
equally fluently.”
Academic
research on social media is developing quickly and Kandy Woodfield, Director of
Learning at NatCen Social Research and co-leader of the New Social Media, New
Social Science? network highlights that using social media for social research
has become a mainstream topic for debate amongst researchers over recent years.
She said:
“We are delighted that the ESRC is funding projects, which will help us to
seize this moment of opportunity to build new approaches to social science
research. These innovative ways of
researching social life present researchers with both challenges and
opportunities and transformative projects like this will help us all to better
understand how we can build robust and ethical approaches to using social media
data.”
Two
researchers from the Manchester School of Art, Dr Simon Faulkner and Professor
James Aulich, add expertise in visual culture to the project.
Dr Faulkner,
Senior Lecturer in Art History, said: “The School of Art is a place where
visual practitioners work with academics to create, display, and interpret a
wide range of images. This experience will be invaluable to a team of
researchers concerned with the in-depth analysis of social media images and
also with how the research might be creatively presented.”
The project
also includes social scientist and industry researcher Dr Francesco D’Orazio,
who is VP Products at Pulsar, a new social media-monitoring platform that has
attracted significant interest within industry.
He said:
“The Picturing the Social project gives us the opportunity to collaborate with
a super talented team of likeminded researchers interested in mapping the
genome of our visual digital culture and develop better tools to support other
researchers in the process."
Samantha
McGregor, Senior Policy Manager, of ESRC said: “We are committed to fostering
and promoting greater transformative innovation and risk in the research that
we support. This award particularly highlights the importance of Big Data, and
specifically social media data, in achieving transformative social science, as
well as their relevance to our broader research portfolio.”
Early
findings of this work will be shared via the Visual Social Media Lab
later this summer.
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