Distant reading 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic photographs

Abstract

How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? Recent studies have suggested that online circulation, especially in a memeified form, might lead to the erosion, fracturing, or collapsing of the original contextual meaning of iconic pictures. Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. The article demonstrates that constantly changing configurations of contextual imagetexts, self-referential image-texts, and non-referential image/texts shape the online live of iconic photographs: ebbs and flows of slowly disappearing, suddenly resurfacing, and newly found meanings. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say.

Rethinking multimodal corpora from the perspective of Peircean semiotics

“…The rapidly expanding field of digital humanities now regularly engages with visual or multimodal materials, which often involves combining methods developed in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning for enriching and exploring large volumes of data (Smits and Wevers, 2023). In addition to methodological explorations that have applied specific computational techniques to different media that range from film (Heftberger, 2018) to photography (Smits and Ros, 2023) and magic lantern slides (Smits and Kestemont, 2021) to mention just a few examples, recent research has sought to couch the application of computational methods to visual and multimodal materials within broader theoretical frameworks, such as the one proposed for "distant viewing" by Tilton (2019, 2023). These efforts have also attracted the attention of multimodality researchers, who have argued that computational approaches to multimodal data in digital humanities would benefit from input from relevant theories of multimodality, which can provide the methodological tools needed for pulling apart the diverse materialities and artifacts studied (Bateman, 2017) and annotation schemes required for contextualizing the results of computational analyses (Hiippala, 2021).…”

Memory, Iconicity, and Virality in Action: Exploring Protest Photos Online

“…To emphasize these temporal distinctions does not mean to deny that viral protest photos can achieve iconic status or disregard scenarios where older iconic protest photos can later achieve virality. Older iconic protest photos like The Woman with the Handbag can 'go viral' when being (re)discovered by new audiences in light of later, resonant cycles of contention (Merrill, 2020;Smits & Ros, 2020). Instead, distinguishing between iconic and viral photos in this way means to better highlight how iconicity and virality interrelate and the consequences of their interrelation for the formation of collective memories including those related to protest.…”

Semiotically-grounded distant viewing of diagrams: insights from two multimodal corpora

“…Parallel to the aforementioned developments in multimodality research, there is a growing interest in the large-scale analysis of 'visual' communication within the field of digital humanities as well (see e.g. Lang and Ommer, 2018;Heftberger, 2018;Arnold and Tilton, 2019;Wevers and Smits, 2020;Münster and Terras, 2020;Smits and Ros, 2020). Arnold and Tilton (2019) propose a framework for distant viewing, arguing that such approaches are needed to counterbalance the strong textual orientation in digital humanities, which excludes a wealth of non-linguistic phenomena that are traditionally of interest to the humanities.…”