Recipes

🧮🔝 Image grid, by ranking and date, annotated

Visualizing top ten images per day (week, month, year)

This approach may be used to study how the visual representations of a particular issue changes overtime. By creating a grid in which columns represent time frames and rows represent engagement values, one is able to observe the change overtime (or lack thereof) in the type of images that create more engagement. This approach should be used with a rather small set of images (no more than 10 images per time frame).

🗄️ Examples

🧱Input from TCAT

– “Media frequency” (grouped per hour, day, week, month, or year)

📃 Steps

  1. Open csv with media frequency and urls in Google spreadsheet
  2. Sort by media frequency
  3. Filter by first time frame (e.g. month of August 2019)
  4. Copy first 10 urls in a new sheet (in column A)
  5. Filter by second time step (e.g. month of September 2019)
  6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each time slot (with new column for each set)
  7. For each column: create an empty column, fill it with formula =IMAGE(URL)
  8. Hide columns with URLs, only showing columns with images
  9. Style grid (add time stamps in headers, define colors and fonts for headers, set the size of columns and rows)
  10. Make a screenshot
  11. Annotate screenshot with Vectr.com

🐙 Inspiration, acknowledgments and contributors

This and other visual methods recipes were originally formulated by Gabriele Colombo drawing on his doctoral work exploring the design of composite images. They were documented and refined for a module on Digital Methods for Internet Studies: Concepts, Devices and Data convened by Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan Gray at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, leading to a set of collaborative group projects with their students and the European Forest Institute. The approaches behind these recipes draw on several years of experimentation with images in the context of research and teaching at the Visual Methodologies Collective (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam), DensityDesign Lab (Politecnico di Milano), the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris) and beyond. You can read more about these approaches in Colombo, 2019 and Niederer & Colombo, 2019. Further readings can be found in the visual methods Zotero bibliography.