Zooming into an Information Community

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SP16: INFO-200 Sec 10 – Inf. Comm – Blog Post #7

It has been illuminating to take a deep dive into one particular information community. The information community of Instagram Users, while niche, is also quite large and global. It has made me consider the specific needs of a given community and their information seeking behaviors. Understanding how and where people look for information is at the core of an information professional’s world, no matter which career path they’re in.

Researching a specific community made me think about user experience in a new way. I can apply personas to the various types of Instagram users and think about what their needs might be. I try to keep abreast of current intellectual property, copyright, & privacy news. Applying these news topics to a case study is helpful in making the more abstract legal concepts more tangible.

data visualization

A radial plot visualization showing 23,581 photos uploaded to Instagram in Brooklyn area during Hurricane Sandy (29–30 November 2012). via Zooming Into an Instagram City

I’ve enjoyed some of the more recent research about Instagram, like Manavoich’s that uses computational analysis and visualizations to learn more about social and cultural patterns of Instagram users. I think this kind of research can be used to think more broadly about social media use and sharing online in general. It is also validating to see metadata, even in its most disposable form, being used to create context and guide scholarship about its content. Looking at demographics from the Pew Foundation and how they change over time gives me a deeper understanding of who the users are. Some of the more academic writing on network theory and information dissemination was also helpful in contextualizing my research.

I can take the ideas and concepts from my explorations in this class into my work in museums by thinking of how various people, audiences, information communities search for images. Working with metadata means constantly thinking about how to connect the information (images of artworks) to those who are looking for it (visitors, curators, conservators, etc.) By immersing oneself into the world of one particular information community, you gain additional perspectives different from your own.

Mapping and Web Archiving Instagram

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SP16: INFO-200 Sec 10 – Inf. Comm – Blog Post #6

One of the key features of Instagram is the ability to add geotags based on the location that the photo was taken. This is useful in adding context to the photo so that viewers know where the user was. This also helps other users in the same place find photos of nearby users.This feature is often used during large events like concerts, marathons, or at college & university functions. It works in addition to any hashtags that were added to the photo caption.

Instagram users can search for a known location while posting their photo. There is also an option to create a custom location. Businesses and organizations often add their name as a location so that users can browse photos on site as a part of their social media marketing strategy. For example, here are photos that have been marked with a geotag for “Getty Museum.”

There are a multitude of services that will create a map visualization of all photos in a certain location. Below is an interactive map from a web service called Instamap that pulls up a number of photos from a specified location. Each photo can be enlarged for viewing and there is a click through to view in the Instagram app. These photos are ones found at or around the Getty Center.

From the museum’s perspective, it could be useful to see how people are engaging with the artworks. The museum can also use this information to interact with visitors by liking their posts and commenting or answering questions. This tool might also be useful for visitors to view other people’s photos from the museum to see what highlights they missed or other things they want to see while visiting.

Instamap

Another emerging technology that is useful to the Instagram community is web archiving. Web archiving is still nascent in its development and use. Web archiving collects and preserves portions of the internet for future use and study. The Internet Archive has been archiving websites for nearly 20 years but websites and technology are ever changing. The Internet Archive uses a technology called Archive-It. It is a subscription based service and the Internet Archive hosts the WARC files. The New York Art Resources Consortium has been arching important art websites and they area viewable here.

The new kid on the scene is Rhizome and their Webrecorder. It is open sourced and the WARC files are self-hosted. Anybody can record a website for preservation into a WARC file for future playback by visiting Webrecorder.io and entering the URL of the website you’d like to save. You can download the Web archive player here. A cool example of an interactive web project archived using this tool is the Instagram account @veteranas_and_rucas. The archived version is viewable here. As you can imagine the static text and image sites are easier than more complex media rich sites or things with interactive and dynamic content. Rhizome just won a $600k Mellon grant for further development of this tool.

Using Webrecorder, I created a WARC of Instagram photos located at the Getty Center. The WARC file can be downloaded here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByyU1Pkqn6AOTHNPanloYmJPSTQ/view?usp=sharing

Don’t forget, you’ll need to download the Web Archive Player to view the file.

Archiving the ephemeral nature of social media is an exciting frontier to be a part of. As technology moves forward, it is important to find ways to save content, both for nostalgic purposes and for future analysis and study. These tools, mapping interactives and web archiving are useful to the Instagram community in understanding the impact one social media platform has on their lives. It is also useful to see how the community as a whole has changed over time.

Web Archive player

Patron Privacy on Social Media

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SP16: INFO-200 Sec 10 – Inf. Comm – Blog Post #5

 

The NYPL Instagram account is very active and successful in getting people to interact with their posts and engaging users. It shares information about library resources, events. It runs contests, recommends books, and promotes other library sponsored activities. All of this makes them more effective at communicating with their audience and providing access to information. They do however need to be careful in how they protect the privacy of their patrons as they are interacting with the Library’s social media.

The third point on the ALA Code of Ethics refers to a patron’s privacy:

We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

Last week, the NYPL held a Q&A with Marley Diaz of #1000BlackGirlBooks. (Look her up, she’s incredible!) How are these questions from patrons being handled? How can the library protect the patron’s privacy? Is there an expectation of less privacy because the question was asked on a public platform? What happens if Instagram posts are archived at the Library of Congress like Twitter is? Patron interactions, that otherwise would be confidential, could now become public, far beyond the reach of a user’s followers and friends lists.

Other things to consider are the rules that govern the platform, since it is owned by a private company. Instagram as a company has a set of community guidelines for people posting to and engaging with the social media platform. They are a private company so they are allowed to make rules beyond the law. In fact, they have been criticized for  their censorship, specifically for banning photos of female nipples (with the exception of mastectomy scars, breastfeeding, and art). Many photographers have had their photos pulled off the site for violating community guidelines. There is a hashtag campaign to #freethenipple that asks how a photo showing female nipples is any different than shirtless male. An Instagram user might come to a library looking for information on the history of censorship. Intellectual freedom and censorship are important information needs of Instagram users – they are both creators and consumers of content. Additionally, the current state of copyright laws on the internet and how they are being abused as tools for censorship, is important for Instagram users to be aware of.

Summary: Information Sharing On Social Media Sites

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SP16: INFO-200 Sec 10 – Inf. Comm – Blog Post #4

The article “Information Sharing on Social Media Sites” in Computers In Human Behavior is a study of how different types of information are shared and how social media users judge credibility of social media sites.

The author, Babajide Osatuyi, is a social media researcher and Associate Professor of Computer Information Science at the University of Texas-Pan American. He has a PhD in Information Systems. He has written several other papers on social media and other information science topics.

How information is presented on different social media sites and how the type of information differs depending on which site it is posted to. The study looks into five different social media technologies. The intended goal for the results of the study are for organizations and individuals have a better understanding of how social media users seek and respond to various types of information presented. What type of content works on which platforms is useful in determining how to share. The credibility of the information presented will have an effect on how the information is consumed.

The study was administered via an online survey and included questions about 4 types of information across 5 different social media technologies. The 4 types of information were: personal, sensational, political and casual information. The social networking sites were: microblogging sites, wikis, forums, and blogs. The 114 participants were college students at a northeastern technical university. The gender skewed male, 79.8% of survey respondents were male, and 20.2% were female. This corresponds to the demographics of other engineering school populations. Data was collected over 3 months. Data was coded and analyzed to see where patterns, variations, and preferences emerged.

This study provides and analysis on how information producers share various types of information. It reviewed how credibility was determined for different content types based on several clues. Credibility was determined by how the information was presented: link to other sources, topic on interest, embedded video, and embedded audio. The most important factor in determining credibility across all sites was the topic of interest, followed by links to other sources. There was a consistent difference between how information was shared on social networking sites compared to wikis, forums, and blogs. The results show that the average user posts topics of interest and embedded video to indicate credibility on social networking sites. On wikis, forums, and blogs the information is more text based though users embed audio or video to attract interest to the information.

Screen Shot 2016-03-19 at 4.26.43 PM

Thinking about how social media users gather information from both social networking sites and other internet sources is helpful in learning about the Instagram community. Much of the information presented on Instagram itself is personal of nature but can also be sensational, political, or casual. The way that social media users contribute and consume from wikis, forums, and blogs is also helpful for how Instagram users might find information about their topic of interest. The gender ratio of this study is skewed male, and was contained to college aged students at a technical college. I might look for other sources that include a more diverse demographic that included a more balanced survey of males and females, other age ranges, and people who might not be in a technical education setting.

References

Osatuyi, B. (2013). Information sharing on social media sites. Computers In Human Behavior, 29(6), 2622-2631. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2013.07.001

Information-seeking behavior of Instagram users

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SP16: INFO-200 Sec 10 – Inf. Comm – Blog Post #3

Instagram Users (Instagrammers) are an active and varied community, though they skew to the younger side. Over half (55%) of all internet users in the 18-29 range are registered for the service, according to Pew Research.  Still a large chunk, 28% of internet users in the 30-49 age range are signed up, 11% in the 50-64 range, and 4% of internet users 65+ are Instagrammers. More than half login to the free app on a daily basis. There is a large community of photographers and designers that share work and inspirations to the site and many other shared-interests communities who share snapshots of their daily lives.
Instagram Demographics
Instagram itself exists at the very beginning of the lifecycle of information, as a primary source that happens right after an event. Instagram photos are immediate, superficial, and ephemeral in nature. The instant-ness or sharing a message, a photo usually accompanied by a caption is the main appeal. In fact, the name Instagram is a portmanteau of the word “instant” a reminder of various forms of instant photography and “telegram” which explains the messaging and personalized, intimate nature of Instagram. (Instagram.com)

The majority of users are non-corporate and use the platform for non-work purposes. Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS) in the context of small world can be applied to Instagrammers to understand the motives and intentions in how they approach information seeking. ELIS in the context of “small world”:

…refers to social environments where individuals live and work, bound together by shared interests and expectations, and often economic status and geographic proximity as well.[56] In small-scale communities of these kinds, activities are routine and fairly predictable, and everyday information seeking and sharing are oriented by generally recognized norms and role expectations based on beliefs shared by members of the community.

There are many sub-communities on Instagram, and they are interconnected with lots of overlap. They seek and share based on interests or even geographic proximity. These shared interests can be found via hashtags, the keywords that are placed in the caption of each photo by the poster to convey additional meaning or search terms that link their photo to others in the same category. For example, a photo might be tagged #dachshundsofinstagram so that others may connect and view other photos of dachshunds. Beyond sharing an image of one’s dachshund, a user might ask for advice or answers from fellow dachshund owners. The dachshund owner community within Instsgrammers can find and answer this question by searching on the popular hashtags for dachshund owners. Shared interests can also be found with geolocations that are part of the metadata created at the time of posting. If someone posts a photo and located is at Griffith Park, they can then search other photos of Griffith Park and gather information about activities, attractions, and amenities of the park through the eyes of other IG users.

Emergency Barking Only @chiefofsecurity #dachshundsofinstagram #weinerdog #doxie #dadjokes

A photo posted by Krystal Boehlert (@kboehlert) on

According to Mason & Robinson, emerging artists are similar to artists in general in the information seeking behaviors. The photographer, designers, and artists that use IG enjoy the serendipitous inspiration that may result from browsing IG, the social connectedness of searching the internet, as well as traditional sources and library materials. Browsing is done through one’s own friends list, or by searching on a hashtag under a photo to find similar or related content. This can be extrapolated to many of the sub-communities that browse Instagram on a daily basis and connect with users with shared interests and seek more information based on hashtags. More research in online communities and social media will be helpful in furthering my research.

References:

Duggan, M. (2015). Mobile messaging and social media 2015. (Pew Research Center). Retrieved from Pew Research Center website: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2015/08/Social-Media-Update-2015-FINAL2.pdf

Helen Mason, & Lyn Robinson. (2011). The information‐related behaviour of emerging artists and designers: Inspiration and guidance for new practitioners. Journal of Documentation, 67(1), 159–180. http://doi.org/10.1108/00220411111105498

Savolainen R. Everyday Life Information Seeking. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition. Taylor and Francis: New York, Published online: 09 Dec 2009; 1780-1789.

https://www.instagram.com/about/faq/