Richard Rogers - Metapicturing: Visual media analysis for Instagram and other online platforms

When: 2024-05-27 14:00-16:00 (Tallinn time)
Where: A108 & online

The event is public via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/94927755198?pwd=VWpWU25DY1JlVFJsbDF4aUtyL3Zvdz09
Websites: https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/r/o/r.a.rogers/r.a.rogers.html

Abstract – Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images (and their analysis), but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures.

Additional information – Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. He is Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, known for the development of software tools for the study of online data. His most recent books are Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2024, 2nd ed.) and the edited volumes (with Sabine Niederer), The Politics of Social Media Manipulation (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media: A Cross-platform Analysis (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). He is currently working on projects on search engine critique, a technical definition of memes, critical analytics, AI platform bias auditing and the public sentiment concerning the Russo-Ukrainian in Chinese social media.

Suggested reading:
Richard Rogers: “Visual media analysis for Instagram and other online platforms”), Big Data & Society, January–June: 1–23: 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20539517211022370