How has Tumblr content about changed over time? How has the content and appearance of changed over time? How has the visual representation of c

Assessment 2: Report on student’s own research (50% of final mark)

Word Count: 1,500

Students will begin this assessment by choosing ONE of the research questions below, that can be answered with the use of digital methods. Students can choose their own case study (issue or website) to focus on in this report:

1. How has Tumblr content about [INSERT ISSUE] changed over time?

2. How has the content and appearance of [INSERT WEBSITE] changed over time?

3. How has the visual representation of [INSERT ISSUE] changed on Twitter over time?

Students will then independently undertake the relevant research using digital methods tools, and produce a 1,500 word report which summarises the research methods they used, and the findings they obtained. The report must have the following components, preferably in this order, and must include references to academic literature:

· An explanation of the rationale for your chosen case study

· A description of  the methods used to obtain the data

· A discussion of the ethical challenges and implications of using these methods

· A description and explanation of your research findings

· A brief note about how you might expand this project, perhaps by incorporating other research methods

Students must use a minimum of seven academic sources in their report.

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How has the visual representation of #LGBT on Twitter changed over time?

1. Introduction

The rise of digital technologies, including social media, have had a significant impact on social life. For example, social media has provided marginalised groups with the opportunity to have a voice and, as a result, gain greater access to recognition. This study aims to explore the shift in the visual representation of the LGBT community on Twitter from 2014 to 2021. It will first explain the importance of the topic and the process of data collection. Secondly, it will discuss the ethical issues and present the findings. Finally, I will analyse the limitations of this study and make recommendations for future research.

2. Rationale

Social media has become a platform for the public to express their views, share their stories, and access information in recent years, and this has changed people's lives to a great extent. In this context, previously marginalised groups in society have been given the opportunity to speak out, and as a result, have received more attention, including the LGBT community, which was once widely discriminated against (Han et al., 2019). The visual representation of the LGBT community in social media is worthy of study for two main reasons. Firstly, although the non-heterosexual community is still somewhat questioned, rejected, and discriminated against compared to the heterosexual community, public knowledge and acceptance of the community and the legitimacy it possesses has increased significantly compared to what it was before. Therefore, the expression of the non-heterosexual community at different stages of its existence is to some extent a reflection of the changing circumstances and trends in society. Secondly, digital images are heavily used in social media and play an increasing role in expressing personal attitudes and opinions (Pearce et al., 2018). Therefore, as Rose (2016) argues, digital images can help researchers understand current communication trends on the internet, which to some extent reflects the views and orientations of the public in the wider society and therefore helps researchers to build a holistic understanding of society.

3. Methods

This study used images on Twitter as data. First, I have searched for all tweets with the #LGBT hashtag and that received at least 20 likes on Twitter from January 2014 to April 2021. The hashtag was chosen because #LGBT is the most popular sexual minority hashtag on Twitter today. Also, the hashtag serves as the most obvious type of social media connection that can be made between users who have not established a follower-followee relationship (Gerrard, 2018). On this basis, I crawled the tweets using the Twitter media downloader, crawling a maximum of 100 tweets and only crawling tweets that contained images. Then I imported the selected sample into Google Sheets to observe and analyse the data.

4. Ethical challenges

Informed consent was not sought from the authors of the tweets in this research. This is because obtaining informed consent is considerably challenging when data collection is conducted on social networking platforms in the face of a diverse sampling population and a large sample size. Furthermore, a section of academics argues that certain internet spaces can be considered as a public area where any naturally occurring data can be included and therefore informed consent is not required for data collection on internet platforms (Tiidenberg, 2018). Despite this, academics do not explicitly state that data collection on social media does not require obtaining participant approval for the use of their images, which is an ethical challenge faced by this study. In addition, all data were anonymised for this study. According to Highfield and Leaver (2014), all digital data needs to be anonymised, and if the data contains images, the necessary means need to be taken to ensure that the images are not identified. Therefore, I blurred all portrait images collected so that they were not recognisable.

5. Findings

This research found that in 2021, the LGBT community is more likely to display their sexual minority status on social media compared to 2014. Furthermore, in 2021, most of the images under the #LGBT hashtag were personal selfies of members of this group, whereas, in 2014, most of the image tweets using this hashtag consisted of calls for sexual minorities to gain equal rights. This change may be due to a shift in the overall social environment, i.e., greater social acceptance and inclusion of sexual minorities. In the past, sexual minorities have faced significant barriers to reaching their relationship goals and low levels of social acceptance of their relationships (Boertien and Vignoli, 2019). As a result, in the early years, relatively few online users were willing to publicly assert their sexual minority status, and most images were cartoon posters that did not contain explicit personal images. Over the past decade, however, societal attitudes towards sexual minorities are changing. In 2014, same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales, providing legal and institutional safeguards for sexual minorities and reducing public hostility against the group. Furthermore, according to Gates (2017), with the rise of the affirmative action movement, among others, young millennials have made the LGBT community much more recognisable.

However, it should be noted that the findings of this study have certain limitations, for example, the sample of this study is not rich enough. This is because of its focus on only one social media platform, Twitter, for images of the LGBT community, its analysis of only one hundred images, and its summary of changes over the past seven years only, which all mean that the conclusions drawn from this study is not the same as talking of the general public.

Figure 1 (left). Nine images under the #LGBT hashtag from January to April 2014

Figure 2 (right). Nine images under the #LGBT hashtag from January to April 2021

Figure 3. a personal selfie under the #LGBT hashtag

6. Future research

Given the shortcomings of this study, future research should expand the richness of the sample, extend the time span of the data collection, and go beyond Twitter. Besides, researchers could consider analysing the representation of sexual minorities in social media in specific countries and comparing trends across countries. In addition, the researcher could consider other research methods, such as online surveys or focus groups interviews.

7. Conclusion

In summary, this study explores changes in the representation of the LGBT community's image on Twitter between 2014 and 2021. By examining a selection of tweets under the #LGBT hashtag, this study found that members of the community are increasingly willing to publicly assert their sexual minority status compared to the past, which may be due to a more inclusive social environment. It is worth noting that there are some ethical challenges in this study, such as not obtaining written consent from the authors of the tweets, and some research flaws, such as the lack of a rich sample, which pose challenges to the validity of this study and should be overcome in future studies.

8. References

Boertien, D. and Vignoli, D., 2019. Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Matters for the Subjective Well-being of Individuals in Same-Sex Unions. Demography, 56(6), pp.2109-2121.

Gates, G., 2017. LGBT Data Collection Amid Social and Demographic Shifts of the US LGBT Community. American Journal of Public Health, 107(8), pp.1220-1222.

Gerrard, Y., 2018. Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media. New Media & Society, 20(12), pp.4492-4511.

Han, X., Han, W., Qu, J., Li, B. and Zhu, Q., 2019. What happens online stays online? —— Social media dependency, online support behavior and offline effects for LGBT. Computers in Human Behavior, 93, pp.91-98.

Highfield, T. and Leaver, T., 2014. A methodology for mapping Instagram hashtags. First Monday, pp.1-25.

Pearce, W., Özkula, S., Greene, A., Teeling, L., Bansard, J., Omena, J. and Rabello, E., 2018. Visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images. Information, Communication & Society, 23(2), pp.161-180.

Rose, G., 2016. Visual methodologies. 4th ed. Los Angeles [etc.]: Sage, pp.289-305.

Tiidenberg, K., 2018. Ethics in Digital Research. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection, pp.466-479.

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How has Tumblr content about K-pop changed over time?

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How has the visual representation of the Feminist movement changed on Twitter over time?

Rationale Background With the increasing public attention to the gender equality in worldwide society, the online debate and discussion about feminism has become inevitable in social media platform. According to Willem and Tortajada (2021), the momentum of feminism in 21st century is mainly motivated by various movements in social media platform, which is an essential factor for researchers to consider in sociology study. As a reflection of social norms and values, the data from Twitter, which is a typical social media platform with enormous number of users in worldwide, can be collected to conduct broader social research in feminism. Key Concepts Twitter provides a platform for users to expose the bias they encounter in daily life, share and communicate with others or using hashtags to get respond (Turley & Fisher, 2018). Therefore, feminist movements on Twitter cause worldwide attention to the oppression of women and the judgement to patriarchy society from individual protest to public action. Meanwhile, visual representations including images and videos are essential in social media research, suggested by Pearce et.al (2020), because of their capacities to express things affectively, which reflects on cultural norms and societies. The visual data is particularly important to collect for researchers to obtain social phenomenon. Thus, the visual representation of feminism on Twitter can be used to illustrate the changes over time. In the research, The WDRA is used to collect visual data and networking content, combined with Google Sheet to present the result. Methods Digital Methods Tool: W.D.R.A Web Data Research Assistant (WDRA) is a fundamental digital methods tool for researchers to collect web sources data without any installation in software. Despite the fact that it does not provide comprehensive analyzation function, the basic capacity to collect network and textual content is enough for social science researchers. To elaborate, setting advanced search on Twitter by keywords or hashtag, combining with the demand for any date range and filter, researchers have the accessibility to the historical content of feminism to obtain the changes. Furthermore, the result can be explored and analyzed with Google Sheet to demonstrate the visual data in feminist movement in different periods. Hashtags As a significant feature on Twitter, the function of hashtags provides users an instant access to the interest topic and share any content within the network. According to Bruns et al. (2016), Hashtags can encourage massive engagement from users on the debate and issue than other programs or movements. Therefore, the content of feminist movement can spread rapidly via hashtags. For example, #MeToo is an impressive movement started by Alyssa Milano who has been sexually harassed as an actress, which cause the feminist movements that worldwide females share their experience about sexual harassment. Hashtags, a dataset who used to share similarities, is an efficient filter in feminist media research to gather the visual data. Ethical challenges 3.1 Informed Consent It is impossible for researchers to implement informed consent when collecting Big Data in network, however, informed consent is a fundamental factor in research ethical (Franzke et al. 2020). To protect the personal identity and private information, the research presents the result by blurring or deleting the personal information. The automatic scraping tool on Twitter dataset cause the problematic situation when obtaining informed consent is impossible, the protection for the private information is essential, especially in collecting visual representation as it may selfies or portraits. 3.2 Protecting Vulnerable Groups According to Sloan and Quan-Haase (2016), because of the phenomenon that users can create virtual profile without real information, it is difficult to determine vulnerable group. Meanwhile, the sensitive content about sexual harassment includes various marginalised background and social diversity. The traceability can be avoided by blurring or changing the user’s information. Findings 4.1 From Individual to Public #MeToo is a hashtag used in the research during data collection on Twitter, setting the data range from March 2018 and March 2021 provides the historical differences in content. WDRA is an automatic scraping tool which collect and generalizes different categories in replies, liked, retweets and images or videos. In Figure 1, most images in March 2018 are the portraits of public figures with breaking news, following the stream in 2017 when the movement implemented by Milano who is the first public figure to use hashtag #MeToo to share sexual harassment experience during worktime. However, in March 2021, Figure 2 shows that the most images are user’s personal portrait with the description of their experience about sexual harassment. It is the transition from specific individuals with public attention to normal users in order to expose their stories for fighting against patriarchy, which is agreed by Rodino-Colocino (2018) that the aim of #MeToo movement is to empower young women to heal from sexual harassment by exposing and feeling empathy. Figure 1. The Images from #MeToo on Twitter (March 2018) Figure 2. The Images from #MeToo on Twitter (March 2021) 4.2 Diversity Another significant change over 2 years is that the image in 2021 express the experience from individuals in different cultural with different identities. It is also a reflection of the improvement of intersectional feminism that the feminist movements are not just fighting for white women’s rights (Brewer & Dundes 2018). In Figure 2, it indicates the experiences from different minorities with different colors and different classes in various countries, which enhance the diversity. Future Research 5.1 Specific Data Mining In addition to the feminist movement changes over times, focusing on the images posted in #MeToo, the research can expand the visual data collection to a specific account or public profile. By using the Twitter Media Downloader, the timeline with the clear presentation of the visual media can be indicated straightaway. Therefore, the way how social changes on gender inequality impact public can be indicated, instead of using hashtags which is a short-term agent in many discussions. 5.2 Cross-sectional Research As the WDRA is a basic digital methods tool without superior filtering or comparing function, the user’s background information, such as the countries she born or age, are not accessible. In order to compare the differences between individuals at the same time, the personal information should be included. However, according to Rose (2016), most of media platforms with images restrict APIs (Application Programming Interface) enquiries, which depends on the platform the researcher conducting with. Therefore, the research can be expanded by setting other filters on keywords or implement new digital methods. Reference List: Brewer, S. and Dundes, L., (2018). July. Concerned, meet terrified: Intersectional feminism and the Women's March. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 69, pp. 49-55). Pergamon. Bruns, A., Moon, B., Paul, A. and Münch, F., (2016). Towards a typology of hashtag publics: A large-scale comparative study of user engagement across trending topics. Communication research and Practice, 2(1), pp.20-46. Franzke, S., Anja, B., Michael, Z., Charles, E., and the Association of Internet Researchers (2020). Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf Pearce, W., Özkula, S.M., Greene, A.K., Teeling, L., Bansard, J.S., Omena, J.J. and Rabello, E.T., (2020). Visual cross-platform analysis: Digital methods to research social media images. Information, Communication & Society, 23(2), pp.161-180. Rodino-Colocino, M., (2018). Me too,# MeToo: Countering cruelty with empathy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 15(1), pp.96-100. Rose, G., (2016). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials. sage. Sloan,L., & Quan-Haase, A., (2016). The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods. 55 City Road, London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: <http://www.doi.org.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/10.4135/9781473983847> [Accessed 24 Mar 2021]. Turley, E. and Fisher, J., (2018). Tweeting back while shouting back: Social media and feminist activism. Feminism & psychology, 28(1), pp.128-132. Willem, C. and Tortajada, I., 2021. Gender, voice and online space: Expressions of feminism on social media in Spain. Media and Communication, 9(2), pp.62-71.

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How do hashtags and affective publics influence the progression of the #FreeBritney movement on Twitter between March and September 2019? Introduction Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been increasingly prominent in social movements following the rapid growth of social media (Sandoval and Ramon, 2014). In 2020, Statista (2021) revealed that the average time a user spends on social media daily has increased to approximately 145 minutes. Following the trend of past research, we can assume that the amount of time spent on social media will gradually increase in the coming years. Twitter features topics ranging from emerging issues and acute events, disseminates information and coordinates social movements (Rambukkana, 2015). For instance, activists use Twitter to provide first-hand information and organise social movements such as #Ferguson (Jackson and Foucalt, 2016). Therefore, social researchers are more likely to be drawn to Twitter when researching social movements and public opinions.  With these pointers in mind, this essay will research the progression of FreeBritney's social movement on Twitter by utilising the Digital Method Tools. First, we will briefly explain the context of the movement and the rationale behind the chosen topic. Then, we will discuss some of the research aims with the support of literature reviews. After that, there will be an explanation of the methodology, ethical challenges, and data collection. Subsequently, we will analyse and discuss our research findings before concluding the research. Context and Research Question Bianca's (2021) article stated that Britney Spears had been under her father's, Jamie Spears, legal conservatorship since 2008. Thus, Jamie possessed the legal rights to control and intervene in Britney's financial and private affairs. While Britney's fans do not feel comfortable with the conservatorship, it was not until 2019 that the movement officially started. In April 2019, comedians Tess Barker and Barbara Gray posted an "emergency episode" on Britney's recent Instagram post after receiving an in-house tip that their conspiracy theory may be true (Daros, 2021). The podcast blew up shortly, and Britney's fans started the movement by creating FreeBritney.net (a website to track and update Britney's conservatorship's journey), Instagram and YouTube accounts (Daros, 2021). They also utilise hashtags (#FreeBritney) in multiple platforms such as Instagram and Twitter to increase visibility, disseminate information, expand their networks and organise in-person movements (Bianca, 2021).  In his article, Daros (2021) stated that unlike social movements such as #BlackLiveMatter and #MeToo that has context that is generalised and relatable, #FreeBritney is a fandom movement that aims to return a single individual the freedom and rights that she rightfully deserves. While it may be less significant than other movements, FreeBritney is intriguing because it demonstrated the power of public pressure (Dani, 2021) to make a change and was able to bring a large amount of attention to conservatorships.  As FreeBritney is a reasonably new movement with a clear timeline, it is ideal for a study on the form of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2016). Unfortunately, although Daros's (2021) reported that Britney's fans use hashtags to organise and generate collective movements offline, our research cannot identify the correlation. However, we can investigate the podcast and hashtags' influence on the growth of the affective public, which contributes to the progress of the movement. Data and Methods Literature Review There have been many literature reviews on the importance of hashtags in social and political movements. Authors such as Suk et al. (2021) and Freelon (2019) have pointed out the importance of hashtags as a communication tool in allowing individuals with similar interests and opinions to connect and form a community. Rambukkana (2015) also specified that hashtags allow users to respond and connect rapidly without restrictions as hashtags are more specific and accessible. Social movements such as #Ferguson (Jackson and Foucault, 2016) have also proven hashtags' strength in disseminating first-hand information right after the incident. As such, hashtags tend to be the preferred method for researchers to collect initial data (Gerrard, 2018), making topical discussions visible and easily accessible.  Papacharissi (2016, p.300) said, "platform affords visibility and voice to publics and issues that are marginalised elsewhere", and those affective publics are formed from the impulse to react towards particular emotion. He explains how social media affords the public to share their stories freely online with the possibility of impacting the public's reaction into sharing, reposting or replying to their posts. The public's help increases visibility on the issue by sharing, reposting, and replying, which gradually provokes change over time. Methods Venturini (2018) mentioned the importance of choosing a suitable tool for social research. Therefore, before starting the research, we contemplated between Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (TCAT) and Web Data Research Assistant (WebDataRA). Both tools are widely known to be free and powerful in capturing and analysing Twitter data. Borra and Rieder (2014) reported that TCAT has the potential to provide robust data by capturing "1 percent"

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