Iconography for the Age of Social Media

Raymond Drainville
2018 Humanities  
An iconic photograph of Ieshia Evans' arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest went viral on Twitter. Twitter users' textual and visual responses to it appear to show recurring patterns in the ways users interpret photographs. Aby Warburg recognized a similar process in the history of art, referring to the afterlife of images. Evaluating these responses with an updated form of iconography sheds light upon this tangled afterlife across multiple media. Users' response patterns suggest new ways to
more » ... velop iconological interpretations, offering clues to a systematic use of iconography as a methodology for social media research.
doi:10.3390/h7010012 fatcat:5av4a37kvfhijhygap7jdfe2tm