Visual Models for Social Media Image Analysis: Groupings, Engagement, Trends, and Rankings

With social media image analysis, one collects and interprets online images for the study of topical affairs. This analytical undertaking requires formats for displaying collections of images that enable their inspection. First, we discuss features of social media images to make a case for studying them in groups (rather than individually): multiplicity, circulation, modification, networkedness, and platform specificity. In all, these offer reasons and means for an approach to social media image research that privileges the collection of images as its analytical object. Second, taking the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires as a case study, we present four visual models for analyzing collections of social media images. Each visual model matches a distinctive spatial arrangement with a type of analysis: grouping images by theme with clusters, surfacing dominant images and their engagement with treemaps, following image trends with plots, and comparing image rankings across platforms with grids

Digital Watchdogs? Data reporting and the traditional 'fourth estate' role for journalists

As governments throughout the world transition to storing and releasing vast amounts of numerical information digitally, journalists are increasingly using digital data reporting as an investigative tool to report on issues in the public interest and to hold government - elected officials and bureaucracy – to account. Through a series of qualitative interviews with data journalists in 17 countries, this article examines the impact that digital data reporting is having on the traditional role of journalism as a fourth estate. Findings suggest the emergence of digital data reporting as a key tool in accountability journalism and in informing and engaging the public. However, the failure of popular ‘tabloid’ journalism to engage with data journalism means that a new technologically adept and data-informed elite class is on the rise, with important implications for democratic processes in advanced societies

Ways of Seeing Data: Towards a Critical Literacy for Data Visualizations as Research Objects and Research Devices

Gray, Bounegru, Milan and Ciuccarelli contribute towards a critical literacy for data visualizations as research objects and devices. The chapter argues for methodological reflexivity around the use of data visualizations in research as both instruments and objects of study. The authors develop a heuristic framework for studying three forms of mediation which data visualizations enact – drawing on research and insights from new media studies, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, cultural studies and critical theory. The chapter illustrates these three forms of mediation with an analysis of visualizations of public finances from civil society organizations, media outlets and public institutions. The authors conclude with an argument towards a broader program of critical literacy for reading and doing research with data visualizations

The Research Persona Method: Figuring and Reconfiguring Personalised Information Flows

This chapter explores the prospects of assembling “research personas” as a qualitative method that uses the positionality of the researcher situated amidst algorithmically suggested content for studying how digital personalisation is produced, encountered and experienced. Building on past and ongoing digital methods projects concerning the networked flow of misinformation, disinformation and authenticity, the research persona method looks not only inside but also across algorithms and digital methods approaches that repurpose the methods of the medium. As an immersive method that is both a product and mode of studying “figuration”, configuring research personas can show how personalisation is produced and accomplished by the interplay of various actors, devices, interfaces, infrastructures, user practices and data flows

Visual representation of emotion in manga: 'loss of control' is 'loss of hands' in Azumanga Daioh volume 4

Comics and manga have many ways to convey the expression of emotion, ranging from exaggerated facial expressions and hand/arm positions to the squiggles around body parts that Kennedy (1982) calls ‘pictorial runes’. According to Ekman at least some emotions - happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust - are universal, but this is not necessarily the case for their expression in comics and manga. While many of the iconic markers and pictorial runes that Forceville charted in an Asterix album to indicate that a character is angry occur also in Japanese manga, Shinohara and Matsunaka also found markers and runes that appear to be typical for manga. In this article we examine an unusual signal conveying that a character is emotionally affected in volume 4 of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Azumanga Daioh: the ‘loss of hands’. Our findings (1) show how non-facial information helps express emotion in manga; (2) demonstrate how hand loss contributes to the characterization of Azuma’s heroines; (3) support the theorization of emotion in Conceptual Metaphor Theory