UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD LEADS FIRST CROSS-PLATFORM ACADEMIC RESEARCH INTO THE DISSEMINATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGES
Study will investigate the burgeoning role of the image in social opinion
¾ Researchers will build a free image research tool for the academic community, quantifying the reach of different images, who shares them and how quickly they spread
Pictures shared on Twitter at the time of the death and funeral of former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher are being examined as part of the world’s first academic research project into the creation and distribution of images on social media platforms and apps.
‘Picturing the Social’, led by Dr Farida Vis, based in the Information School at the University of Sheffield, is the first project to explore the impact social images have on society and the shaping of opinion.
Dr Vis said: “This project will deepen our understanding of the role of images in digital society, which is arguably as profound today as it was in the largely pre-literate mediaeval world when the image was didactic. Most current sentiment analysis tools are not really fit for the purpose of interpreting the power of images because they are algorithms that mine text, not images. They are good at interpreting words, but they are less useful at understanding sarcasm, sadness, emojis and, crucially, images. What our study will investigate is the resurgent role that images play in communicating ideas, news and opinion and shaping our perceptions of events. A tweet consists of 140 characters; a picture, as the cliché goes, paints a thousand words.”
Since Twitter launched, the majority of social media platforms that have launched in its wake are image-based, placing them beyond reach of sentiment analysis tools. The study’s examination of reactions to the death of Baroness Thatcher will provide an insight into the way that images shape our understanding of significant events.
The study will examine the way that images go viral, exploring the characteristics of viral content and the paths of distribution.
For the project, academics have already collected nearly 150,000 tweets containing images directly shared on Twitter and have downloaded 17,000 different images.
The most shared image in the data gathered thus far is a picture of a public screen in Leeds with two people watching the funeral live in an otherwise largely empty square. Other widely circulated images include old news material, spoof images, references to popular culture, cartoons and screenshots of discussions.
The study will also examine images distributed by younger people, some of whom were born after Baroness Thatcher left power.
Analysis will encompass Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine.
Dr Vis said: “Images tend to be trickier to study than words. With the rise in techniques that focus on large volumes of text, specifically with the growing interest in so-called ‘Big Data’, images tend to get forgotten. They are not easy to ‘mine’ for content and even harder to interpret.”
The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will involve an interdisciplinary team from four universities as well as industry with expertise in: Media and Communication Studies (University of Sheffield), Visual Culture (Manchester School of Art), Software Studies and Sociology (Warwick University), Computer and Information Science (Pulsar and University of Wolverhampton).
A key aim of the project is to use the insight from both academia and industry to build a free research tool for the academic community – work which will be led by Professor Mike Thelwall, Head of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton.
The tool will allow researchers to capture this visual data to highlight and study different aspects. This will include the popularity of different kinds of images, who shares these, how quickly they spread, how they’re tagged, may include location data as well as look more closely at how images are discussed and appropriated.
A new Visual Social Media Lab will officially launch in September, which will work with a number of different stakeholders, including the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
Dr Vis said: “What we see in industry is that there is a huge surge of interest in social media images.
“You see a lot of new apps, new companies and tools developing in this space. People are really interested in, for example, what users are doing with brands. From a research perspective a key issue that is raised over and over – and rightly so – is concern over ethics and privacy.
“What social media companies, marketers and researchers do with these images is important in the context of ethics. I feel that social media users themselves are often left out of these discussions, which is unhelpful and we hope to change that.”
Sian Thomas, Head of Analytics at the FSA, said: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with the University of Sheffield on this exciting initiative to better understand the opportunities of Big Data for government, and how it might contribute to evidence-based policy making.”
Dr Olga Goriunova, from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University, said: “Being able to understand our contemporary condition means being able to draw upon computer science, design, social, media and art theory equally fluently.”
Academic research on social media is developing quickly and Kandy Woodfield, Director of Learning at NatCen Social Research and co-leader of the New Social Media, New Social Science? network highlights that using social media for social research has become a mainstream topic for debate amongst researchers over recent years.
She said: “We are delighted that the ESRC is funding projects, which will help us to seize this moment of opportunity to build new approaches to social science research. These innovative ways of researching social life present researchers with both challenges and opportunities and transformative projects like this will help us all to better understand how we can build robust and ethical approaches to using social media data.”
Two researchers from the Manchester School of Art, Dr Simon Faulkner and Professor James Aulich, add expertise in visual culture to the project.
Dr Faulkner, Senior Lecturer in Art History, said: “The School of Art is a place where visual practitioners work with academics to create, display, and interpret a wide range of images. This experience will be invaluable to a team of researchers concerned with the in-depth analysis of social media images and also with how the research might be creatively presented.”
The project also includes social scientist and industry researcher Dr Francesco D’Orazio, who is VP Products at Pulsar, a new social media-monitoring platform that has attracted significant interest within industry.
He said: “The Picturing the Social project gives us the opportunity to collaborate with a super talented team of likeminded researchers interested in mapping the genome of our visual digital culture and develop better tools to support other researchers in the process.”
Samantha McGregor, Senior Policy Manager, of ESRC said: “We are committed to fostering and promoting greater transformative innovation and risk in the research that we support. This award particularly highlights the importance of Big Data, and specifically social media data, in achieving transformative social science, as well as their relevance to our broader research portfolio.”
Early findings of this work will be shared via the Visual Social Media Lab later this summer.
1. The Visual Social Media Lab is @VisSocMedLab on Twitter. More information can be found here: http://visualsocialmedialab.blogspot.co.uk/
2. Dr Farida Vis is a Faculty Research Fellow. Her fellowship focuses on ‘Big Data and Social Change’. She is a leading social media scholar and has published widely in this area. She sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media: http://www.weforum.org/content/global-agenda-council-social-media-2012-2014
3. Full title of the project: ‘Picturing the Social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research’. Full list of co-investigators: Dr Simon Faulkner, Manchester School of Art; Professor James Aulich, Manchester School of Art; Dr Olga Goriunova, Warwick University; Professor Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton and Dr Francesco D’Orazio, Pulsar.
4. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent high quality research, which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes.
5. NatCen Social Research (www.natcen.ac.uk) is Britain’s largest independent social research organisation. By really understanding the complexity of people’s lives and attitudes, NatCen gives the public a powerful role in shaping decisions and services that make a difference to everyone. NatCen has formidable reputation for delivering relevant and robust research and providing capacity-building activities, which help to strengthen the quality of social research in the UK. NatCen has been leading an international network of over 600 researchers using social media in their research for since 2011. This community of practice is exploring how social media are pushing the boundaries of established methodologies and collectively exploring ways to ensure these new forms of social science are robust, ethical and impactful http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/.
6. The Food Standards Agency is an independent government department responsible for food safety and hygiene across the UK. The FSA works with businesses to help them produce safe food, and with local authorities to enforce food safety regulations. Everything the FSA does reflects their vision of ‘safer food for the nation’. The FSA aims to ensure that food produced or sold in the UK is safe to eat, consumers have the information they need to make informed choices about where and what they eat and that regulation and enforcement is risk-based and focused on improving public health
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