On Hyper-locality: Performances of Place in Social Media
Co-authors of the article: Nadav Hochman and Mehrdad Yazdani.
Published in: Proceedings of 2014 International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).
Abstract:
This work combines perspectives from Art History, Cultural Theory, Data Visualization, and Computational Social Science. We propose theory of "hyper-local social media" and then describe one case study. We start by historicizing the "hyper-local," drawing parallels between conceptualizations of “site-specific” artworks created in the 1970s and current phenomena of geo-temporal social media images. For our case study, we analyze how people in NYC engaged with the 30 works created by famous street artist Banksy during his October 2013 residency in New York City. We analyze and visualize patterns in 28,419 Instagram photos people took showing these artworks to explore how people engaged with them and how these Instagrams add new meanings to the works.