Un paio di giorni fa abbiamo (io e Luca) risposto ad una CFP mandando questo abstract del paper Eyes on Europe.
During the last few years the Internet has been increasingly described as a mass media where user can not only consume but also create and distribute their contents. This huge quantity of data available online, often archived to be easily searched, represents a new and interesting empirical field for sociological research. This essay is an example of a possible approach to this data. Based on two well know methodological and theoretical pillar (content analysis and social systems theory), the paper shows the results of the analysis of over 500000 photos tagged <Europe> available in the Flickr archive. Although Flickr is not usually considered as a Social Network site it offers a great infrastructure to share images within the flickr’s community and also with other Internet users. These networks of pictures are the basis upon which it is possible the emerging of a wide social community. The existing link between uploaded pictures and tags used to describe every specific picture allow the researchers to observe the semantic value given to the photos.
The aim of the project was to discover the emergent semantic of the concept of Europe related to the construction process of the European Union. Is the European semantic observed in flickr comparable to classical national semantic? In order to answer this question a comparison between Europe and USA was also drawn demonstrating two completely different semantic halos: the European related mostly to geographic and historic concepts and the American related (in addition to those concepts) also to national visual symbols like (e.g. flags, flag poles, star and stripes…) that seem to be absent in Europe saw as a whole.
Quando lo abbiamo inviato già non credevamo di avere molte possibilità di vedere il paper pubblicato sulla
Special Theme Issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture
perchè la call era probabilmente più orientata a lavori su siti tipo orkut, friendster, etc.
Adesso, dopo aver letto l’ultimo posto di Danah, siamo anche in grado di quantificare le nostre effettive probablità 🙂 .