Images in Social Media Research: Digital Tools and Methodological Challenges

From memes on Twitter and Reddit to Instagram posts and TikTok videos: Images are taking on increasingly important roles in social media communication. While social media research can draw on established tools in the field of text analysis, researching visual content still presents particular methodological challenges. How can images be systematically searched and scraped from the web? What qualitative and quantitative possibilities are there for structuring, visualising, and evaluating big image corpora and their metadata? How can a sustainable and critical approach to sensitive images look like?

This one-day workshop aims to bring together image researchers from different disciplines. On a very hands-on level, we want to explore digital tools that might offer pragmatic solutions for researching images on the web. Furthermore, the academic (re)use of images from social media raises particular ethical and legal issues. Digital media researchers, legal scholars and art historians will provide insight into their method designs and open up critical perspectives on how to deal with visual content online.
 
Please register for the Zoom-meeting in advance: https://bit.ly/3W9eZrq