Picturing the Social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research

Social media have transformed our understanding of the modern world, but a detailed understanding of the role of images in effecting these transformations has been neglected compared to other forms of data. From a social science perspective this explosion in rich online communication exchanges opens up possibilities for better understanding these new forms of social expression through organic data rather than through more traditional forms of social science data. The scale of social media use also makes it important for social science research concerned with Big Data. Through innovative, cross-disciplinary work, including with industry, using state of the art technical infrastructures, we will develop a framework for analyzing the value of social media images to better understand these new social worlds. Specifically we are interested in how these new forms of social expression can be understood through studying their technical infrastructures. Including a focus on users, we investigate how a bottom-up understanding of social media users can better inform how these structures are experienced. We are concerned with devising comprehensive methodological and theoretical strategies for the capture and interpretation of social media image data. This will be done at different scales, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We are interested in finding ways to enable the study of images to become a more central focus within social media and Big Data research and will investigate how such a shift in focus may have an impact on key stakeholders and end-users.
People currently produce and use a lot of images as part of their everyday lives, primarily using digital media and online social media platforms. Amongst UK Internet users, posting photos has significantly increased in recent years. The taking and sending of photos are now the two most prevalent activities after text messaging. People send, collect, organize, and show images of things they value, including already existing images that they value, often because they are valued in a wider collective cultural context. Such images can be meaningful as documents, forms of play, acts of witnessing, as aesthetic artefacts, historical records, and/or as tokens of collective identity. By focusing on the structures, users, and the content of social media images, the project will produce cross-disciplinary theoretical and methodological innovations for understanding how images function as pictures of the social world and within the networked relationships of social media. These conceptual devices and methods will address the quantitative magnitude and the qualitative intensity of social media image production and circulation. They will include the development of online tools to capture and study both small-scale and large-scale image datasets.
We suggest that for social media and Big Data research to comprehensively and rigorously address the huge shift in communication technologies, it needs to be able to speak to and account for the complexities and fluid nature of the current information ecosystem. In order to understand these new forms of social expression, focusing here on the production, use and circulation of images these elements have to be studied and understood together. The technical and software infrastructure that shapes how users are able to communicate through social media and how this enables other users to make sense of this content needs to be included in this. In the emerging fields of social media and Big Data research emphasis is placed on the volume, veracity and variety of data, rather than its meaning or depth. Consequently, critiques of Big Data have highlighted that a more nuanced approach is required. Approaches sensitive to multiple data characteristics including an attention to 'deep data', will allow for a fuller understanding of society in a complex world. We argue this can be achieved in a particularly rich way by looking at social media images.

We see the beneficiaries of this research as being the government, policy-makers and think tanks, the private sector and the academic community. We see strong potential for Economic and Societal impact, specifically for the planned research to make a contribution to evidence-based policy making and influencing policy (at local, national and international level), to enhance research capacity, knowledge and skills of businesses and organizations, and contribute to the training of skilled people in non-academic professions. Ensuring potential beneficiaries have the opportunity to engage with our research, we plan to organize a number of different dissemination activities to develop a strong stakeholder engagement prior to impact:

1. Events: we plan to organize three project workshops for our identified stakeholder communities: those from the government and the policy-making community, the private sector and academic stakeholders;
2. Press activity: we aim to actively engage with the press and broadcast media through the writing of targeted media briefings and press releases as well as invited media appearances where appropriate;
3. Communications activity: we will translate our research in an accessible and tailored format for our identified specific user groups.
Most of these activities will be through the Visual Social Media Lab.

In our Pathways to Impact document we outline our impact objectives per group, as well as our existing strong track records in relation these different stakeholder groups, and finally, we give a number of examples of what measurable impact indicators might look like.
In organizing the three project dissemination events (in London, Sheffield and Manchester), aimed at maximum engagement and therefore capping numbers at around 30 participants for each event, we will draw on our networks and lists of participants from previous impact events. We will also actively engage with the media in sharing our work and news of our events. The PI has recently been invited to Radio 4's flagship programme 'Start the Week' to contribute on the subject of social media. Through potential future invitations of this kind, further public engagement will be enabled. Moreover, all project team members are experienced public speakers and have made national and international media appearances.

The Visual Social Media Lab will be the public face of the project, and will facilitate knowledge exchange by enabling a strong identity and online presence for our research. We will produce six easy-to-read rapid response reports that all project team members will contribute to. We will seek advice from our Advisory Board, from stakeholders through our events, and the wider academic community. Our social media engagement will be through dedicated social media accounts managed by specific team members.

We will develop and agree on an impact strategy in the first three months of the project and seek advice from our Advisory Board to confirm the effectiveness of our planned strategy and help shape future activities. We will organize events through online booking systems (e.g. Eventbrite) and collect data on participants prior to the event and well as through an exit survey to determine if the needs of our identified user communities have been met and if our research has been communicated clearly and productively. We will also monitor and collect metrics for our website as well as our social media engagement.

Impact indicators could include:
- Evidence that stakeholders are actively engaging with and using our research, for example by directly citing it or by inviting project team members to present/brief on the research;
- To see a take-up of our developed research methodology by the identified stakeholders;
- To see a take-up of the project research tool for collecting and processing social media image data;
- In general, to see a wider engagement with social media images, which can be traced to our research.