From Flickr to Snapchat: The challenge of analysing images on social media

Farida Vis, Information SchoolUniversity of Sheffield

@flygirltwo

Images posses the ability to grab our attention

Social media companies know this

Images are key to engagement

750 MILLION IMAGES

SHARED DAILY

Camera: used to be for special occasions Smartphone: always with us

Everyday snaps Witnessing events

US 65% smartphone penetrationSmartphones overtaken desktop usage to access the internet

Mobile internet accounts for majority of internet use in US (57%)Users typically access the internet via apps on mobile devices

All figures from comScore, US Digital Future in Focus, 2014

UK: The over-55s will experience the fastest year-on-year rises in smartphone penetration.

Smartphone ownership should increase to about 50% by year-end, a 25% increase from 2013, but trailing 70% penetration among 18-54s.

The difference in smartphone penetration by age will disappear, but differences in usage of smartphones remain substantial. Many over 55s use smartphones like feature phones.

All figures from Deloitte, predictions for 2014

Rise of platforms and apps focused on visual content

PinterestTumblr

InstagramVine

Snapchat

‘Mobile first’ –> ‘… and only’ | simple easy, user friendly design

Facebook daily image uploads: 350 million (November 2013)

Instagram daily image uploads: 60 million (March 2014)

Twitter: 500 million tweets daily (March 2014)

Snapchat daily snaps: 400 million (November 2013)

Images largely ignored in social media research

Not easy to ‘mine’

Hard to figure out meaning

Huge interest in industry

Images in crisis communication

Social Reading the Riots, 2011

Social Users debunking rumours

Image sharing during the 2011 UK riots

‘Although the Twitter user chose the viewing position and shared the image through Yfrog the original image data was created by one of Google’s ‘numerous data collection vehicles’ using their R5 ‘panoramic camera system’’ (Anguelov et al., 2010, pp. 32-33).

The burning bus: 57 unique URLs

Hurricane Sandy

Image sharing practices during crises: fakes

#FakeSandy pics 250,000 tweets (4hrs)

1 weekendhttp://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com/

‘fakes’

What is shared by locals vs wider social media audiences/users?

Where in the ‘long tail’ might we find useful information?

Most visible ≠ most valuable

Hurricane Sandy images

• Fake as in Photoshopped• Fake as in still from Hollywood disaster movie• Fake as in not what we think we’re looking at• Perceived fake, but in fact real

• Intensions of users? What do we think they are doing?

"Picturing the Social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research.”

ESRC Transformative Research grant

Farida Vis (PI) – Media and CommunicationSimon Faulkner – Art History/Visual CultureJames Aulich - Art History/Visual CultureOlga Gorgiunova – Software Studies/SociologyMike Thelwall – Information Science/softwareFrancesco D’Orazio – Industry/Media/software+ Research Associate – Digital Ethnography

“Qualitative data on a quantitative scale”

(D’Orazio, 2013)

Traditional broadcasting model

Production of message

Message = text

Reception of the message

Building new theory and method

Structures

Users

Content

Structures

Users

Content

How do social media companies make images visible?

Address the quantitative magnitude and the qualitative intensity of social media image

production and circulation

• Screen Shot 2014-07-09 at 06.05.51

Doing interdisciplinarity

Images shared on Twitter (natively uploaded) around the death and funeral of

Margaret Thatcher

150,000 tweets17,000 different images

Seeing like software/like a human

How are images sorted and organised?

How do we select what to look at?

How do these images circulate/Where have they come from?

How do we (re)present them?

Direct Visualisation/Lev Manovich

Aby Warburg’s mnemosyne

visualsocialmedialab.org@VisSocMedLab

f.vis@sheffield.ac.uk@flygirltwo