PhD defence: Towards a Visual Social Data Science

SODAS PhD student Anna Helene Kvist Møller will defend her dissertation "Towards a Visual Social Data Science: An AI-Assisted Approach to Analysing Visual Collective Action" on Friday 11th April.

Assessment committee
• Associate Professor Hjalmar Alexander Bang Carlsen, University of Copenhagen (chair)
• Professor Sabine Niederer, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
• Professor Eeva Luhtakallio, University of Helsinki

Supervisors
• Rebecca Adler-Nissen, University of Copenhagen
• Aders Blok, University of Copenhagen

Abstract
This dissertation consists of three papers, bound by a common aim: to develop and apply a methodological framework for exploring and understanding visual collective action. The first paper presents a methodological guide for AI-assisted visual content analysis that aims to make the abundance of visual data and custom computer vision techniques more accessible and transparent for social scientists. The second paper investigates the social aesthetics of digital diplomacy, analysing over 55.000 images from diplomats’ tweets to explore how visual content contributes to upholding diplomacy as a global institution. The third paper examines the vernacularisation of global environmental issues on Instagram, analysing over 45.000 images from Scandinavian users to reveal an alternative presentation of the climate and biodiversity debates; one focused on everyday life. Together, these papers contribute to the emerging field of Visual Social Data Science by innovating how combining machine automation with human interpretation and assessment can lead to systematic, reliable, and ethically sound analyses of images at scale.