The symposium offers insight into methodologies to study cultural and social practices through and with social media visual content. It tackles questions related to the strengths and weaknesses of computational tools and techniques to produce deep understandings of these practices, suggests alternative ways (e.g., ethnographic, feminist, interpretative) to approach “big data”, and provides guidance to investigate the intersection of technology, media and culture. Applications of these “alternative” visual methods is discussed in relation to a range of contemporary social media platforms, among which, Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Session 1: Making Big Data Small? (3 tasters)
Feminist digital ethnographies in an algorithmic interface (Radhika Gajjala)
This presentation draws on continuing work that I am doing with a team of co-researchers. We examine the research challenges faced in attempting to use tools developed for running computational data analytics on various kinds of data to examine social media events through a feminist ethnographic lens. Our explorations open up ways to appropriate computational tools meant for "big data" research" in order to understand smaller chunks of data while emphasizing their situatedness. As Annika Richterich notes “researchers need to move away from bigdata-driven approaches, focused merely on techno-methodological innovation, towards data-discursive research foregrounding ethical controversies and risks as well as moral change. This discursive development needs to occur in combination with innovative approaches for engaging potentially affected individuals and stakeholders”.