Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media

Abstract

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.

The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media

“…As some users take pictures, tweet or checkin in many geographical locations, others' activity are confined to a small subset of the city's area revealing the unique patterns for each user. In the Phototrails project, Hochman and Manovich (2013) demonstrated how researchers can follow an individual user's online activity and visualize their pattern of mobility based on 22 the type of places frequented (Figure 1). As the user's actions are highly curated and intended to present a certain depiction of the self, the type of places users select to checkinto or take photos of hold valuable meaning beyond their physical location.…”

“…By utilizing Instagram's API, recent works have tried to make sense of the massive collections of photographic representations on Instagram (Hochman and Manovich, 2013;Hochman and Schwartz, 2012). While studies that focus on methods for analysis of geolocated photographic images (Crandall et al, 2009) or studies that utilize geocoded photographs to make claims about urban space (Doersch et al, 2012) have gained traction, scholars are still investigating questions pertaining to motivations for use and social practices and norms on Instagram.…”

Anthropology with algorithms?

“…2 These research centers, among others, have developed tools and research protocols that can be used by social and cultural scientists to analyze digital data (Hochman and Manovich 2013;Niederer 2013;Rogers, Sanchez-Querubin, and Kil 2015;Schäfer 2011;Woltering et al 2015). Such tools can be used for analyzing Instagram images according to their color composition (Hochman and Manovich 2013), for creating networks of Facebook users engaging with public Facebook posts (Rieder 2013b, 350), or for analyzing subcommunities of online forum participants (Seale, Ziebland, and Charteris-Black 2006).…”

On localizing urban events with Instagram

“…In [7], Instagram was studied as a social media visualization tool to identify cultural dynamics in major cities. The study particularly zoomed into the city Tel Aviv, Israel, for a period of two weeks collecting images shared on important national event days.…”