investigate the appropriation of imagery into the telling of the disaster event<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nThe authors combined both statistical analysis and content analysis in their investigation.<\/p>\n
The first question aims to understand if the photos\u00a0distributed on social media correlates to the\u00a0actual structural\u00a0damage\u00a0geographically, and if\u00a0such distribution can measure the disaster\u00a0accurately. They found that the distribution is significantly correlated statistically, however, a more in-depth analysis revealed that the\u00a0geotags mean relatively little in relation to the finer aspects of geography and damage in Nepal: the images\u00a0are less frequently photos of on-the-ground activity, and more frequently infographics and maps that originate from news and media.<\/p>\n
The second question aims to understand how local and global audience perceive and relate to the disaster. They defined the boundary between \u201clocal\u201d and\u00a0\u201cglobal\u201d by the usage of Nepali, and pided the tweets into two dimensions: time (after first vs. after second) and geolocation (local vs. global), resulting in four categories (globally-sourced-after-first, globally-sourced-after-second, locally-sourced-after-first, and locally-sourced-after-second). The analysis results from hand-coding the Top 100 most retweeted image tweets in each of the four\u00a0categories show a different diffusion of content, with locals focusing more on the response and the damage the earthquake caused in their cities, and the global population focused more on the images of people suffering. After the second earthquake, the results suggest some disaster fatigue for those not affected by the events and\u00a0celebrity attention becomes the new mechanisms for maintaining the world\u2019s gaze upon Nepal.<\/p>\n
The third question studies the two competing expectations: journalistic accuracy and drawing a collective gaze of photography. They found four images in the full dataset of 400 image tweets that were confirmed to be appropriated from other times and\/or places in globally-sourced-after-first, and an additional image in locally-sourced-after-first that has ambiguous origins. The fact that those images are appropriated is\u00a0acknowledged either through replies or the\u00a0originaltweets\u00a0\u201cas an honest mistake\u201d, as “another way of visually representing disaster and garnering support through compelling imagery”.<\/p>\n
Reflections:<\/h4>\n
This paper\u00a0investigated imagery contents on tweets about the two earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, as a example to analyze disaster representation on social media. I appreciate the thorough analysis taken by the author. They looked at the tweets with image contents with three different research questions in mind, and studied different dimensions of such tweets as well as their correlations: \u00a0between geotags and contents, between local and global audiences, and between actual pictures of the disaster and appropriated images from other time and\/or locations.<\/p>\n
Their analysis is comprehensive and convincing, in that they combine complete and strong statistical analysis and in-depth content analysis. This well structured\u00a0analysis revealed that despite the strong statistical correlation between geotags and images, the pictures posted are mostly infographics from news media which doesn\u2019t really tell much about the\u00a0\u201cobjective\u201d depict of the on-the-ground situations of those affected places. It is a good example of the importance of content analysis and future researchers should not settle with superficial statistical phenomena and should try to look at the data closely.<\/p>\n
Especially, I found their way of defining the boundary of local vs. global by language smart. In spite of the\u00a0acknowledged limitation mentioned in the paper, languages can effectively distinguish the audience of the tweets. Taken into consideration that Nepali is the only official language, it\u2019s an efficient and smart way of taking advantage of this.<\/p>\n
Questions:<\/h4>\n\n- Do you agree with the authors that \u201c…therefore, to watch is to witness. It is a responsibility to watch, even when watching is nevertheless entangled with problems of objectification and gratitude for not being a victim oneself.\u201d is true in a global, geographically distributed online community? In other words, what do you think of\u00a0the value of a\u00a0\u201ccollective gaze\u201d in the Internet era?<\/li>\n
- What do you think of image appropriation? Is it acceptable to draw wider range of attention from a broader, global community, or is it\u00a0journalistically inaccurate and irresponsible thus not acceptable?<\/li>\n
- What do you think of the authors\u2019 way of distinguishing\u00a0\u201clocal\u201d and\u00a0\u201cglobal\u201d via language? Can you come up with a better boundary?<\/li>\n
- In their hand-coded\u00a0categories of tweet contents, they\u00a0acknowledged that “relief & recovery\u00a0rescue\u201d also contains\u00a0\u201cpeople suffering\u201d. Why do they not merge these two\u00a0categories? What do you think of their coding schema?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paper: Bica, M., Palen, L., & Bopp, C. (2017).\u00a0Visual Representations of Disaster. In\u00a0Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing\u00a0(pp. 1262\u20131276). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Discussion Leader: Tianyi Li Summary: This paper\u00a0investigated the representation of the two 2015 Nepal earthquakes in April and May, via images shared on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":308,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions\/308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}