Picturing the Social: analysing social media images. Seminar

This talk will focus on the new project: ‘Picturing the social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research.’ The aim of this project is to better understand the huge volumes of images now routinely shared on social media (750 million shared daily) and what this means for society. The talk will include reflections on the personal experiences of doing inter/post-disciplinary work on social media. In developing this new transformative research project, thought has been put into how for example, 'Picturing the Social' brings together Art Historians with software developers through a series of innovative small projects informed by a facet methodology approach (Mason, 2011). A key question that arises is: how can and do we productively talk to each other across disciplines? Some of the methodological and theoretical thinking that underpins this research and how it challenges the ways in which media and communication has traditionally been studied, will be discussed. A series of concrete examples of these smaller projects will also be provided, including on the images that were shared on Twitter around the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher.