Researching Visual Social Media Platforms

Abstract

With the meteoric rise of Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, it is clear that image- and video- based platforms have become tremendously important to our social, political, and economic lives. However, there are unique challenges associated with data collection and analysis on visual social media platforms. This workshop explores the following questions in detail: How do we integrate and weigh Big Data questions with more in-depth contextualized analysis of social media content? How do we categorize textual and visual content, addressing issues of ontology? How can we scale small data to big data in visual spaces? Ultimately, it is argued that image/video data produced and consumed on social media has real value in helping us understand the social experience of everyday and profound events, but studying these types of data often requires innovations in theory and methods. Hands-on methods work will involve participants collecting data from YouTube and understanding structured metadata and unstructured data involving visual content.