Anders Kristian Munk

(Re-)Appropriating Instagram for Social Research: Three Methods for Studying Obesogenic Environments

The paper discusses three ways of appropriating Instagram for social research through the case of obesity. We draw on the notion obesogenic environments, in which obesity is understood as related to a wide range of cultural, social and physical factors. Together with a group of obesity researchers and cultural analysts we explored a dataset of 82,449 Instagram posts tagged with location from the five most and the five least overweight local authorities in the UK. The geo-located posts were studied through three distinct approaches to the data; each drawing on their own set of interdependent conceptualizations of what constitutes obesogenic environments, Instagram and cultural analysis respectively. The first approach values Instagram as a repository of images that can be coded and counted; while the second asks about the everyday practices of Instagram users. In a third approach we view Instagram itself as an analytical tool that produces a media-specific version of phenomena such as obesity. Following this third appropriation, we conclude that to unlock Instagrams potential for social research it must be considered as more than a collection of user-tagged images, but as an analytical context in its own right.

Actor-Network VS Network Analysis VS Digital Networks Are We Talking About the Same Networks?

Este artigo discute diferencas e afinidades entre tres tipos de rede (Ator-Rede, Analise de Redes e Redes Digitais) importantes para o Digital STS. 2 Nas ultimas decadas, a colonizacao de pesquisas em STS foi lenta e gradual. Ela se inicia com a Teoria Ator-Rede (TAR), que oferece um conjunto de nocoes para descrever a construcao de fenomenos sociotecnicos. Com o advento da Analise de Redes, estudiosos incorporam tecnicas de investigacao e visualizacao desenvolvidas pela Analise de Redes Sociais (ARS) e pela Cientometria aos estudos em STS. Com o crescente uso de recursos computacionais pelos STS, estudiosos atentam para as Redes Digitais como modo de rastrear a vida coletiva. Muitos pesquisadores tentaram relacionar esses tres movimentos aos metodos digitais, ao apostarem que a TAR pode ser operacionalizada por meio da Analise de Redes, gracas aos dados providos pelas Redes Digitais. No entanto, alem da homonimia presente na palavra “rede”, que caracteriza as tres abordagens mencionadas, ha poucas evidencias que comprovam a continuidade entre esses tres tipos de rede. Falamos das mesmas redes?