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

社交媒体改变了我们对现代世界的理解，但与其他形式的数据相比，对图像在影响这些转变中的作用的详细理解一直被忽视。从社会科学的角度来看，丰富的在线交流的爆炸式增长为通过有机数据而不是通过更传统的社会科学数据形式更好地理解这些新的社会表达形式提供了可能性。社交媒体使用的规模也使得与大数据相关的社会科学研究变得重要。通过创新的跨学科工作，包括与行业合作，使用最先进的技术基础设施，我们将开发一个分析社交媒体图像价值的框架，以更好地了解这些新的社交世界。具体而言，我们感兴趣的是如何通过研究其技术基础设施来理解这些新的社会表达形式。包括对用户的关注，我们调查如何自下而上的理解社交媒体用户可以更好地告知这些结构是如何体验的。我们关注的是为社交媒体图像数据的捕获和解释制定全面的方法和理论策略。这将在不同的规模上进行，使用定量和定性方法。我们有兴趣寻找方法，使图像研究成为社交媒体和大数据研究的一个更核心的焦点，并将调查这种焦点的转变如何对关键利益相关者和最终用户产生影响。人们目前生产和使用大量图像作为日常生活的一部分，主要使用数字媒体和在线社交媒体平台。在英国互联网用户中，近年来张贴照片的人数显著增加。拍摄和发送照片现在是继短信之后最流行的两项活动。人们发送、收集、组织和展示他们重视的事物的图像，包括他们重视的现有图像，这通常是因为它们在更广泛的集体文化背景中受到重视。这些图像可以是有意义的文件，游戏形式，见证行为，作为美学人工制品，历史记录和/或集体身份的象征。通过关注社交媒体图像的结构，用户和内容，该项目将产生跨学科的理论和方法创新，以了解图像如何作为社交世界的图片和社交媒体的网络关系。这些概念设备和方法将解决社交媒体图像生产和流通的数量规模和质量强度。这些活动将包括开发在线工具，以获取和研究小规模和大规模图像数据集。我们认为，社交媒体和大数据研究要全面、严格地应对通信技术的巨大转变，就需要能够应对和解释当前信息生态系统的复杂性和流动性。为了理解这些新的社会表达形式，在这里重点关注图像的生产，使用和流通，这些元素必须一起研究和理解。技术和软件基础设施，塑造用户如何能够通过社交媒体进行通信，以及如何使其他用户能够理解这些内容，需要包括在其中。在社交媒体和大数据研究的新兴领域，重点放在数据的数量，准确性和多样性上，而不是其意义或深度。因此，对大数据的批评强调需要一种更细致入微的方法。对多种数据特征敏感的方法，包括对“深层数据”的关注，将有助于在复杂的世界中更全面地了解社会。我们认为这可以通过查看社交媒体图像以一种特别丰富的方式实现。

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.