The Infra-city: The Exceptional and the Everyday in Social MediaLev Manovich, The Graduate Center, CUNY Mehrdad Yazdani, Software Studies Initiative, UCSD Alise Tifentale, The Graduate Center, CUNY Jay Chow, Katana, San Diego, contact: Project background: Visualizing Patterns in Databases of Cultural Images and Video (NEH Humanities High Performance Computing grant, 2009) Interactive Visualization of Media Collections for Humanities Research (NEH Digital Startup Level 2 grant, ) Twitter Data Grant (2014) all tweet with images worldwide since 2011, a few hundred millions in total We collected all Instagram geo-tagged images shared in central part of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian Revolution (February 17-22, 2014). Source: Instagram API. Dataset: 13,208 images 6,162 Instagram users 2.14 average images per user 5,845 unique tags in English, Ukrainian, Russian 21,465 tags in total Visualization in humanities: theory and method 13,208 images shared in Kiev over 144 hours (with 21,468 tags in three languages) paint their own fascinating picture. This picture is not a photo of social reality. Instead, it can be compared to a modern painting (filtering reality). It contains some references to the world outside, but it is not its realistic copy. Our goal was to see this picture dispersed between all images, tags, time stamps, image locations. To do this, we explored the data in as many ways as we could and then selected what we feel were most interesting views of this picture. Each view is a construction by researchers. There is no natural way to visualize tends of thousands of images or tags. Even a simplest view (e.g., tags sorted by popularity, images sorted by time) is already a construction. (If we think that visualizations reveal patterns in the data, its only because some views have become naturalized.) All images organized by time (February 17-22, 2014). One of our key views: The exceptional co-exists with the everyday Discovering the everyday types: automatic image clustering Map view: locations of images shared during Feb 17 Map view: locations of images shared Feb 18-22 Quantity over time views (line graphs) Tags view: top 25 tags organized by MDS Subject categories in images with Maidan tag(s) Flags displayed prominently (detail) Jean-Pierre Rey. Girl waving flag in crowd during the general strike. Paris, May 1968. Miscellaneous subjects related to Maidan Screenshots Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg. Barricades of the Paris Commune. April 1871, Paris. Barricades (detail) Fire or smoke during the day Fire or smoke during the night