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

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Social media have transformed our understanding of the modern world, but a detailed understanding of the role of images in effecting these transformations has been neglected compared to other forms of data. From a social science perspective this explosion in rich online communication exchanges opens up possibilities for better understanding these new forms of social expression through organic data rather than through more traditional forms of social science data. The scale of social media use also makes it important for social science research concerned with Big Data. Through innovative, cross-disciplinary work, including with industry, using state of the art technical infrastructures, we will develop a framework for analyzing the value of social media images to better understand these new social worlds. Specifically we are interested in how these new forms of social expression can be understood through studying their technical infrastructures. Including a focus on users, we investigate how a bottom-up understanding of social media users can better inform how these structures are experienced. We are concerned with devising comprehensive methodological and theoretical strategies for the capture and interpretation of social media image data. This will be done at different scales, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We are interested in finding ways to enable the study of images to become a more central focus within social media and Big Data research and will investigate how such a shift in focus may have an impact on key stakeholders and end-users.People currently produce and use a lot of images as part of their everyday lives, primarily using digital media and online social media platforms. Amongst UK Internet users, posting photos has significantly increased in recent years. The taking and sending of photos are now the two most prevalent activities after text messaging. People send, collect, organize, and show images of things they value, including already existing images that they value, often because they are valued in a wider collective cultural context. Such images can be meaningful as documents, forms of play, acts of witnessing, as aesthetic artefacts, historical records, and/or as tokens of collective identity. By focusing on the structures, users, and the content of social media images, the project will produce cross-disciplinary theoretical and methodological innovations for understanding how images function as pictures of the social world and within the networked relationships of social media. These conceptual devices and methods will address the quantitative magnitude and the qualitative intensity of social media image production and circulation. They will include the development of online tools to capture and study both small-scale and large-scale image datasets. We suggest that for social media and Big Data research to comprehensively and rigorously address the huge shift in communication technologies, it needs to be able to speak to and account for the complexities and fluid nature of the current information ecosystem. In order to understand these new forms of social expression, focusing here on the production, use and circulation of images these elements have to be studied and understood together. The technical and software infrastructure that shapes how users are able to communicate through social media and how this enables other users to make sense of this content needs to be included in this. In the emerging fields of social media and Big Data research emphasis is placed on the volume, veracity and variety of data, rather than its meaning or depth. Consequently, critiques of Big Data have highlighted that a more nuanced approach is required. Approaches sensitive to multiple data characteristics including an attention to 'deep data', will allow for a fuller understanding of society in a complex world. We argue this can be achieved in a particularly rich way by looking at social media images.