Janna Joceli, a DM PhD Student, has participated in the DMI Summer School 2017 in Amsterdam

31 Jul 2017

The Digital Methods Initiative Summer School was held at the University of Amsterdam from June 26 to July 7.

Janna Joceli, a doctoral researcher in Digital Media, has attended the 10th edition of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) Summer School at the University of Amsterdam, under the theme “Get the picture - Digital Methods for Visual Research”. In this two-week intensive course participants had the opportunity to do exploratory and experimental research advanced by digital methods approach. Substantive research projects are conceived through the Digital Methods Summer School, and such projects can be facilitated by DMI researchers or conducted by participants. 

In the first week, she joined the project Making Climate Visible lead by Warren Pearce and Suay Ozkula. In the second week, Janna Joceli accepted the challenge of pitching a project about Hashtag Engagement Research, and her proposal has expanded in quality after the invitation of Elaine Rabello (Associate Professor at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) and André Mintz (Doctoral Researcher in Communication Studies at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais). Together they pitched the project and conducted work on “Visualising Hashtag Engagement - Imagery of Political Engagement on Instagram”. The group was also composed by Suay Ozkula (Research Associate on the ESPRC-funded project ‘Making Climate Social’ at the University of Sheffield), Ece Elbeyi (Research Assistant in Media Department at Istanbul Bilgi University, and Master Student in Media and Communication Systems), Gabriela Sued (Research Professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Buenos Aires) and Alessandra Cicali (Freelance Journalist and cofounder of Eurete - European Reporting Team).

The project main proposal was to study hashtag engagement under four perspectives*: i) media item - using metrics of audience engagement per media item combined with user activity over time; ii) user - using metrics of caption or hashtag adoption per user (over time); iii) visual - analysing visual characteristics of images associated with hashtags (over time), and iv) grammars of Hashtags - looking at forms of hashtag use: positioning/alignment, double sense hashtags, hijacked hashtags, hate hashtag. This project thus explored visual methodologies (Rose, 2016) in order to grasp the logics and structures of hashtag engagement (production, circulation, actors, generated content), drawing the rise of political polarization in Brazil as a case study (see the project pitch slides and the Wiki Report). In addition, the project took into ways to include the ordinary voice along the right and left wing protests of March 2016 in Brazil. The group explored new visual methods such as relying on Google Vision API to analyse label-image and tag-image networks, they also used Cortex to conduct text analysis, and finally they adopted Raw graphics and ImageSorter to facilitate the analysis of the visual culture of the dominant voices of the protests.

Janna Joceli shares her research insights in https://thesocialplatforms.wordpress.com and tweets at @JannaJoceli. Her papers are available in Academia and presentations in SlideShare.

* Omena, J.J. et al. (forthcoming). Visualising Hashtag Engagement on Instagram

Janna Joceli proposes four approaches to Hashtag Engagement Research

Team working

Janna Joceli and André Mintz analysing the image label network of anti-coup protests (18th March 2016)