Workshop Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Workshop: Workshop on Images in Online Political Communication (PhoMemes)
DOI: 10.36190/2022.44Images have proven to be catalysts of emotions and ideals at a personal level and for collectives hoping to make change. Political mobilization can be triggered and directed by images which share ideological position, and politicians can use them to signal to followers where they position themselves within the political spectrum. As content becomes easier to create and disseminate from the populace those seeking to study the images will find themselves in need of tools to improve the efficiency and organization of their work. This study presents an analysis of the datasets that the application Tagasaurus can produce. Tagasaurus, is a cross platform application for providing semantic information as annotations for images. The annotations guide the user to input descriptions for the production of hashtags, emotional variables and memes. The export facility allows a JSON to be produced for the collection of annotations and subsequently a researcher can investigate associations. Based on a dataset of over a 100 images, a set of diagrams displays the capabilities for investigating cross community meme adoption in order to see the overlaps and distinctions in the symbolism used between groups sharing content. The investigation also shows how emotions and hashtag co-occurrences can be studied.