How are users’ experiences of production, sharing, and interaction with the media they create mediated by the interfaces of particular social media platforms? How can we use computational analysis and visualizations of the content of visual social media (e.g., user photos, as opposed to upload dates, locations, tags and other metadata) to study social and cultural patterns? How can we visualize this media on multiple spatial and temporal scales? In this paper, we examine these questions through the analysis of the popular mobile photo–sharing application Instagram. First, we analyze the affordances provided by the Instagram interface and the ways this interface and the application’s tools structure users’ understanding and use of the “Instagram medium.” Next, we compare the visual signatures of 13 different global cities using 2.3 million Instagram photos from these cities. Finally, we use spatio–temporal visualizations of over 200,000 Instagram photos uploaded in Tel Aviv, Israel over three months to show how they can offer social, cultural and political insights about people’s activities in particular locations and time periods.
How do the organization and presentation of large-scale social media images recondition the process by which visual knowledge, value, and meaning are made in contemporary conditions? Analyzing fundamental elements in the changing syntax of existing visual software ontology-the ways current social media platforms and aggregators organize and categorize social media images-this article relates how visual materials created within social media platforms manifest distinct modes of knowledge production and acquisition. First, I analyze the structure of social media images within data streams as opposed to previous information organization in a structured database. While the database has no predefined notions of time and thus challenges traditional linear forms, the data stream re-emphasizes the linearity of a particular data sequence and activates a set of new relations to contemporary temporalities. Next, I show how these visual arrangements and temporal principles are manifested and discussed in three artworks:
Picture-taking has never been easier. We now use our phones to snap photos and instantly share them with friends, family and strangers all around the world. Consequently, we seek ways to visualize, analyze and discover concealed socio-cultural characteristics and trends in this ever-growing flow of visual information. How do we then trace global and local patterns from the analysis of visual planetary–scale data? What types of insights can we draw from the study of these massive visual materials? In this study we use Cultural Analytics visualization techniques for the study of approximately 550,000 images taken by users of the location-based social photo sharing application Instagram. By analyzing images from New York City and Tokyo, we offer a comparative visualization research that indicates differences in local color usage, cultural production rate, and varied hue’s intensities— all form a unique, local, ‘Visual Rhythm’: a framework for the analysis of location-based visual information flows.
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