A methodology for mapping Instagram hashtags

Highfield, Tim; Leaver, Tama

doi:10.5210/fm.v20i1.5563

Cited by 135 publications

(127 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Rogers (2013) argues that examining those procedures must therefore entail using specifically digital forms of enquiry: tracing links, for example, coding queries addressed to Application Programming Interfaces, analysing the tags attached to images (Highfield and Leaver 2014).…”

Section: Some Methodological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

Rose

2015

Progress in Human Geography

143

131

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This paper addresses how geographers conceptualise cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the 'new cultural geography' in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North) has changed fundamentally, as digital technologies for the creation and dissemination of meaning have become extraordinarily pervasive and diverse. Yet geographical studies of cultural objects have thus far neglected to consider the conceptual and methodological implications of this shift. This paper argues that such studies must begin to map the complexities of digitally-mediated cultural production, circulation and interpretation. It will argue that to do this, it is necessary to move away from the attentive gaze on stable cultural objects as formulated by some of the new cultural geography, and instead focus on mapping the dynamics of the production, circulation and modification of meaning at digital interfaces and across frictional networks.

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Section: Some Methodological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

Rose

2015

Progress in Human Geography

143

131

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“…Social tagging is an expression of the emergent social organization of users which constantly changes with new contributions (Highfield & Leaver, 2015). As on Twitter, hashtags may also have the function of aggregating conversations and creating thematic communities (Bruns & Burgess, 2011).…”

Section: Instagram: Depicting Everyday Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Images of Breastfeeding on Instagram: Self-Representation, Publicness, and Privacy Management

Locatelli

2017

Social Media + Society

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As recent feminist studies have recognized, breastfeeding is an interesting area of investigation since it encompasses several social and cultural issues involving both the private and the public sphere. These range from how motherhood is lived and interpreted, the representation of the body, how children are reared, women’s self-representation, breastfeeding support, and maternal work. The article illustrates a qualitative analysis of a sample of Instagram images tagged with breastfeeding-related words, with the aim of analyzing how breastfeeding is represented and the relationship between private and public discourses. For this reason, images coming from both mothers and breastfeeding promoters were analyzed. The analysis shows that breastfeeding representation on Instagram confirms, and also goes beyond, the common image of breastfeeding a newborn, showing toddlers’ breastfeeding or mothers pumping breastmilk. It also shows that breastfeeding may be connected with a wider approach to parenthood, based on proximity, and that children are active subjects of the decisions taken. The research indicates that the relationship between public and private discourses is an overlapping of shades. On one hand, research results showed several strategies enacted by parents for protecting their children’s privacy; on the other hand, the functions of images posted veer between fixing a private moment and creating public discourses using specific hashtags aimed, for example, at normalizing public breastfeeding or offering new types of support. Instagram appears, then, as a platform where personal choices and beliefs can flow into public discourse and a place for investigating how public discourses and social and cultural issues (such as breastfeeding promotion and representation) shape the way that breastfeeding is lived.

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“…The role and function of the hashtag has been much discussed in this respect (Alam et al 2017;Highfield & Leaver 2015Leaver & Highfield 2018), yet of particular interest to us is the persona work that is done when hashtags move Instagram users beyond their micropublics (Marshall 2014) to broader publics, and signal a desire to not only contribute to and participate in particular conversations, but mark and legitimise specific archives and taxonomies. By inviting viewers to consider the relation between the image and the tag, hashtags also provide opportunities for performances of wittiness and cleverness to sarcasm, politics, and even dullness: #dog, when accompanied by a picture of a dog, indicates a movement from the individual's relationship to the animal, towards a much larger public of dog owner's sharing their images via the platform.…”

Section: The Dimensions Of Instagram Persona Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The research methodology and method of data collection were developed in response to the Instagrammatics approach outlined by Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver (2015Leaver ( , 2016. Although the data were collected manually through screenshots and a third-party application (Websta), rather than querying the Instagram API, the methodological design took into consideration Highfield and Leaver's (2015) key concern around conducting Instagram research: that the data is dynamic, in that each comment adds to the original post, rather than becoming a data point on its own. By manually accessing posts tagged #watchingtv, the dataset avoided the inclusion of posts where the hashtag was mentioned in the comments (potentially repositioning the original post).…”

Section: A Case Study Of #Watchingtvmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study

Barbour

Lee²,

Moore

2017

Pers Stud

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<p>In the last issue’s editorial, “Five Dimensions of Online Persona” (Moore, Barbour and Lee 2017), we turned our attention to the proliferation of public identities through online platforms, and traced key nodes of research that inform how we think about and theorise online personas. We also proposed and outlined five primary dimensions to the online persona that we characterised as public, mediatised, performative, collective, and having intentional value. The scope of that work was deliberately broad and far-reaching—we envisioned that piece as neither tool nor template but, we hoped, a conceptual starting point for further thinking and research.</p><p>In this editorial we seek to continue that work by putting these theoretical foundations and concepts into practice through a study of the persona work of Instagram. This work constitutes, in many cases, significant labour: decisions are made and remade around sharing different types of images, along with the use of hashtags, framing, timing, filters, captions, or tags. Abidin (2016, p. 90) describes this as “visibility labour”, which is “the work individuals do when they self-posture and curate their self-presentations so as to be noticeable and positively prominent” to their audiences or micro-publics, and notes that the labour itself becomes invisible in the persona creation process. This distributed visibility labour forms the basis of persona work, where users and their micro-publics, in conjunction with the platform and the algorithms that drive it, are continually iterating on the persona that is produced. </p>

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A methodology for mapping Instagram hashtags

Cited by 135 publications

References 6 publications

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

Images of Breastfeeding on Instagram: Self-Representation, Publicness, and Privacy Management

Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study

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