Gillian Rose responds to an event on visual methods on her blog. She focuses in particular on Lev Manovich’s work at the Software Studies Initiative. I’ve been trying to follow their work for a while, in particular the creative means they have been developing for analysing the visual images in social media content. In Gillian’s blog post she discusses and links to their ImagePlot visualisation software. This software is designed to locate patterns in the
Images used in social media. Of course, as things stand much of the analysis of social media content focuses upon text, given that visual images are so central in social media it seems that this is really an area that needs to develop. Software like ImagePlot is a good place to start. Maybe the visual analysis of social media content will expand over the coming years. It seems important to move away from a purely text based focus. The problem, as Andrew Abbott pointed out (see here for a brief discussion), is finding patterns in such monumental data. It is here that software like ImagePlot might allow us to find these patterns. Gillian raises some potential limitations of this kind of software led analysis in her post.
