[ecrea] One-day conference on social media images - 20 June

*//////PICTURING THE SOCIAL CONFERENCE//////*

*/A one-day conference exploring contemporary image sharing on social 
media & online visual cultures, which aims to create productive dialogue/*

*Monday, 20 June 2016*

Grand Hall, Whitworth Art Gallery 
<http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/>, Manchester

*10:00 – 17:00*

In recent years individuals, groups of people, and organisations have 
become more reliant upon visual images and practices of visualisation as 
means of understanding and communicating about the world. The wide use 
of camera phones in combination with the on-going rise of social media 
platforms, catering to easy image sharing, has resulted in everyday 
image production and sharing on an unprecedented scale. Most recently, 
Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends report highlights that younger users 
increasingly prefer to communicate via images, and more broadly, that 
daily photo sharing across Snapchat, Facebook (including Messenger), 
Instagram and WhatsApp now exceed 3 billion shares /every day/ (which is 
up from 1.8 billion in 2014, a figure frequently cited). These 
activities are increasingly attracting academic interest.

Businesses and government bodies now treat images shared on the Internet 
as a valuable form of data that can be used to inform commercial 
decision-making and help develop policy. In addition to this, verbal and 
numeric forms of data are increasingly presented through data 
visualisations that are intended to provide synoptic views of the 
available information. These developments have increasingly have 
attracted important, timely and wide-ranging critique, including from 
academia. These developments also point to the contemporary existence of 
what W.J.T. Mitchell has recently called ‘Iconomania’, a term that 
refers to an intense desire to see and understand the world through 
images and visual displays. This notion is useful and widely applicable 
whether one considers governmental, military, and corporate 
surveillance, or forms of citizen witnessing, journalism as well as 
counter-surveillance utilising digital cameras to document the actions 
of the powerful.

In response to these complex developments, this one-day conference seeks 
to create dialogue between different areas of research and practice 
relevant to the use of images on social media and to the wider visual 
web. To do this, the conference brings together prominent academic 
researchers from Visual Culture, Internet Studies, and Media Studies 
with industry-based researchers and practitioners from the areas of 
Social Data, Data Visualisation, Journalism and Data Analytics to 
explore crucial issues relevant to contemporary digital visual cultures. 
The conference seeks to demonstrate the breadth and richness of research 
and practice in these areas as well as to raise pressing questions that 
relate to how images and visualisations are used within different 
aspects of contemporary social, cultural, economic, and political life. 
This will be done with a concern to see how approaches from different 
sectors of research and practice might potentially productively inform 
each other.

The conference has been organised by the *Visual Social Media Lab* 
<http://visualsocialmedialab.org/> (based at The University of 
Sheffield). The VSML develops new interdisciplinary methods and 
analytical approaches for the study of online visual culture by bringing 
together expertise from a range of academic disciplines as well as 
industry. This VSML team involves academics and industry researchers 
from The University of Sheffield, Manchester School of Art (MMU), 
University of Wolverhampton, Royal Holloway, University of London, and 
Pulsar.

*Attendance at the conference costs £20(only!). Please register **here* 
<http://buyonline.mmu.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=8&catid=31&prodid=2552>

*
*

*/////SCHEDULE/////*

*9.30-10.00*       Registration

*10.00-10.15*     Welcome and Introduction

Farida Vis <http://visualsocialmedialab.org/core-team/farida-vis> 
(Visual Social Media Lab/University of Sheffield)

*10.15-11.00*     Talk 1: Language of the Eye: How Computer Vision is 
Remaking Social Media

Susan Etlinger 
<http://www.altimetergroup.com/about-us/our-company/our-team/susan-etlinger/> 
(Altimeter Group, A Prophet Company)

Images have the power to capture emotion and call people to action in a 
way that words often cannot. They can frequently be interpreted and 
understood without need for translation. They can spark trends and 
movements overnight, as we have seen with everything Black Lives Matter 
to Star Wars memes. But there is another factor at play. Social and 
mobile media have fueled an explosion of images on the Internet, whether 
in the form of photos, emoji, GIFs or video. According to a recent 
report, people share and upload 1.8 billion photos daily. This is both 
exciting and terrifying for industry, because approximately 80 percent 
of images that include a brand logo do not refer to the brand directly, 
which means that organizations are flying blind when it comes to 
detecting the content and context of images, and acting on the 
opportunities or risks they may present.

Today, organizations from start-ups to industry goliaths such as 
Facebook and Google are working on technologies that analyze the content 
of a photo. Increasingly, they’re also applying artificial intelligence 
to understand the context, manage brand reputation, detect opportunities 
and threats, better understand customer attitudes and behaviors, and 
identify product and service opportunities. Yet while the image 
recognition market is expected to increase at a 19.1% combined annual 
growth rate by 2020, it is still a nascent technology.

This talk will lay out the context of the growing image recognition 
market, outline use cases and challenges of image recognition technology 
for industry, discuss the social and ethical concerns presented by the 
increasing use of images for organizations that wish to better 
understand not only what people say about them, but what they see.

/Chair: Farida Vis/

*11.00-11.15*     Break

*11.15-1.00*       Panel 1: Qualitative approaches to social media images

This panel explores a range of qualitative approaches to and 
interpretations of the use of images on social media, via a number of 
different case studies, including: the sharing practices of the Alan 
Kurdi image in September 2015, the way in which different groups in 
Sheffield use Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to ‘image’ Sheffield, and 
a recent case study from France, to encourage women to wear the hijab 
for a day to combat the rise of Islamophobia.

*Speakers*

Lin Prøitz <http://visualsocialmedialab.org/core-team/lin-pr%C3%B8itz> 
(Visual Social Media Lab/University of Sheffield)

Anne Burns <http://visualsocialmedialab.org/core-team/anne-burns> 
(Visual Social Media Lab/University of Sheffield)

Katharina Lobinger 
<http://www.ipkm.uni-bremen.de/en/members/academic-staff/detail/lobinger-1.html> 
(University of Bremen)

Fatima Aziz <http://imagec.hypotheses.org/> (EHESS, Paris)

/Chair: Ray Drainville (Visual Social Media Lab/MMU)/

*1.00-2.00*         Lunch

*2.00-3.45*         Panel 2: Social media images, politics, and protest

This panel addresses relationships between images on social media and 
political practices and identities, focusing examples on the use of 
social media images for the purposes of policy-making, journalism, 
activism and protest. Two cases discussed will include the use of 
Facebook for political purposes by Palestinian photographers and 
journalists and the May 1st demonstrations in Milan in 2015.

*Speakers*

Simon Faulkner <http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/sfaulkner> (Visual 
Social Media Lab/MMU)

Paolo Gerbaudo <http://www.tweetsandthestreets.org/> (King’s College London)

Matteo Azzi <http://www.densitydesign.org/person/matteo-azzi/> and 
Gabriele Colombo <http://www.densitydesign.org/person/gabriele-colombo/> 
(DensityDesign/Politecnico di Milano)

Rebecca Moody 
<http://www.eur.nl/erasmusstudio/people/current_members/moody/> (Erasmus 
University, Rotterdam)

/Chair: Jim Aulich (Visual Social Media Lab/MMU)/

*3.45-4.00*         Break

*4.00-4.45*         Talk 2: ‘Diversity on the Internet: A Goat Thing’

An Xiao Mina <https://about.me/anxiaostudio> (Meedan)

“Kittens,” said Tim Berners-Lee, when asked on Reddit what he never 
thought the internet would be used for. And yet cats themselves are 
culturally situated, reflective of those who have historically been the 
internet’s primary users: middle class Westerners. As the internet’s 
global population diversifies, cats’ presumed dominance deserves a 
second look.

Over the past year, I led research on a world map of animal memes shown 
at “How Cats Took Over the Internet,” an exhibition at the Museum of the 
Moving Image. Reflecting the collective work of over a dozen internet 
scholars and researchers, the map looks at animal memes in different 
regions, with a special focus on the global south. What’s revealed is a 
diverse meme-nagerie, including llamas in Mexico, donkeys in Tajikistan 
and—perhaps most revealingly—a global trend toward goats.

In this talk, I will take a brief look at cat media online vis a vis the 
history of internet users and global connectivity. Discussing the map, I 
will argue that new meme cultures reflect a profound shift in internet 
population, as connected users reflect a wider range of lifestyles.

/Chair: Olga Goriunova (Visual Social Media Lab/Royal Holloway)/

*4.45-5.00*         Closing Remarks – Farida Vis (followed by a 
*reception* at 17:15)


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