Images have been a communication venue since the ancient era, although alphabets have been a dominant form of communication for the last 2,000 years. Recently, with the development of digital technologies, it has become much easier to create, deliver, and access visual information. As a result, images are gaining new attention as a venue of communication. The use of visual information is pervasive, from professional and commercial purposes to entertainment. This is especially true in social networking environments where people play diverse roles such as an information creator, disseminator, and consumer. Ordinary people often make use of images to convey information and their ideas.
The purpose of this study is to understand how people use …show more content…
So, rather than gathering a huge amount of Twitter messages using API, this study collected Twitter messages, which embed images in the messages, via the search interface provided by the official Twitter site (www.twitter.com). On May 13, 2013, two keywords, “Boston” AND “pic.twitter.com”, were submitted through the ‘advanced search’ interface in order to retrieve Boston Bombing related Twitter messages that contained images. Other possible search keywords could be considered for generating a dataset, but this study decided to use these two keywords for the following reasons. First, for selecting topical keywords, the authors reviewed Boston Bombing related tags from a tag-cloud result. In addition to ‘Boston’, ‘marathon’, ‘everyone’, ‘prayers’, ‘explosions’, ‘people’, and ‘thoughts’ appeared highly related to the Boston bombing incident. Among these tags, ‘Boston’ was selected because it seemed to comprehensively retrieve related Twitter messages with a minimum noise. Second, the authors observed Twitter messages in order to select keywords for retrieving Twitter messages with embedded images. In Twitter images are included via links, and two types of links were observed. One type of link directs to images which are inserted in other media; in other words, the link goes to a news article, a website, and/or a Facebook page and includes images. In these cases, images are related not only to Twitter messages but also to original sources (e.g., news article, Facebook, website). The other type of link directs to stand-alone images; these images do not belong to other media or sources. In order to focus on the relationship between images and Twitter messages, only stand-alone images were selected for this dataset. It was found that ‘pic.twitter.com’ is the dominant prefix of links to stand-along
The purpose of this study is to understand how people use …show more content…
So, rather than gathering a huge amount of Twitter messages using API, this study collected Twitter messages, which embed images in the messages, via the search interface provided by the official Twitter site (www.twitter.com). On May 13, 2013, two keywords, “Boston” AND “pic.twitter.com”, were submitted through the ‘advanced search’ interface in order to retrieve Boston Bombing related Twitter messages that contained images. Other possible search keywords could be considered for generating a dataset, but this study decided to use these two keywords for the following reasons. First, for selecting topical keywords, the authors reviewed Boston Bombing related tags from a tag-cloud result. In addition to ‘Boston’, ‘marathon’, ‘everyone’, ‘prayers’, ‘explosions’, ‘people’, and ‘thoughts’ appeared highly related to the Boston bombing incident. Among these tags, ‘Boston’ was selected because it seemed to comprehensively retrieve related Twitter messages with a minimum noise. Second, the authors observed Twitter messages in order to select keywords for retrieving Twitter messages with embedded images. In Twitter images are included via links, and two types of links were observed. One type of link directs to images which are inserted in other media; in other words, the link goes to a news article, a website, and/or a Facebook page and includes images. In these cases, images are related not only to Twitter messages but also to original sources (e.g., news article, Facebook, website). The other type of link directs to stand-alone images; these images do not belong to other media or sources. In order to focus on the relationship between images and Twitter messages, only stand-alone images were selected for this dataset. It was found that ‘pic.twitter.com’ is the dominant prefix of links to stand-along