Category: instagram

Pastagram

While preparing and arranging today’s meal – Penne al Forno con Polpettine – to be documented and posted on Instagram, I thought: Why not preparing and arranging a pasta network with the help of the Instagram API and the Gephi network visualization software. I did this before for many other things such as Chinese cities or spring.

The special Instagram magic lies in the hashtags users are posting to their (and their friends’) images. These hashtags can be used to create social network datasets out of the image streams of the API. If someone is posting an image of their pasta dish and is tagging it with “#salmon”, then this tag is the link to all other images also tagged with “#salmon”. Theoretically one could do the next search for salmon and find out which images are referred to by this hashtag. This would produce a large map of human concepts plus their visualization in photographs.

What I did was taking a really small sample of 40 pasta images posted to Instagram during the last week and calculated the links between a) images and b) hashtags. The result is a bimodal network: images are connected to hashtags; and hashtags are connected to images and other hashtags. This is the resulting network:

Pasta Social Network Analysis

I also created a version with all the images in the network as thumbnail, so you can see the different qualities in the image (brightness, colours, composition, filters etc.) Right now I am working an a way to automatically assemble and publish image based networks that would properly embed the images.

Some facts about pasta imagery on Instagram:

  • There’s dinner pasta (upper left) and lunch pasta (upper right). Lunch pasta tends to be more colorful and bright, while dinner pasta can be very dim arrangements on restaurant tables or unboxed pizza and pasta deliveries.
  • Another interesting category is tagged with “distasters”. This hashtags clearly corresponds to the images.
  • The most important hashtags are: pasta, food, chicken, foodporn, delicious, italian, cooking, yummy, foodgasm, foodie.
  • When looking at a larger sample of pasta pictures, the most important hashtags change a bit, but our small sample seems to be quite representative: pasta, food, foodporn, yummy, lunch, dinner, delicious, yum, italian, cheese, spaghetti, homemade …
  • Filters are very frequently used in pasta photography: only 22% of all images are posted without any filters.

Finally, here’s a look at the top five pasta images:

4 out of 5 are photographed by Japanese IGers. So the next thing to look at will be the regional distribution of food hashtags. To be continued.

Telling stories with network data: Spring on Instagram

The days are getting longer, the first flowers come into bloom and a very specific set of hashtags are spreading through Social Media platforms – it’s spring again! In this blogpost I took a look at spring-related pictures on Instagram. Right now, the use of hashtags on Instagram has not entered the mainstream. For this analysis, I took a look at the latest 938 images tagged with “#spring”. The average rate was 12 spring-tagged pictures a day, but this rate will be increasing during the next days and weeks.

The following hashtags were most frequently used in combination with the #spring hashtag:

  1. Flower(s) (198 mentions, 2639 likes)
  2. Sun (160, 2018)
  3. Tree(s) (130, 2230)
  4. Nature (128, 2718)
  5. Love (119, 1681)
  6. Girl (107, 1469)
  7. Sky (89, 2057)
  8. Fashion (64, 924)
  9. Beautiful (61, 1050)
  10. Blue (59, 1234)

Although I would associate spring with green, the Instagram community has other preferences:

  1. Blue (59 mentions, 1234 likes)
  2. Pink (42, 396)
  3. Green (40, 444)
  4. White (29, 457)
  5. Yellow (22, 369)
  6. Red (17, 230)
  7. Black (16, 267)
  8. Brown (7, 117)
  9. Orange (7, 77)
  10. Grey (3, 50)

So these are the spring colors according to Instagram hashtags

Here are the top 15 most liked spring pictures on Instagram right now:

Here’s the tag network that is showing the relations between the 2445 other unique hashtags that appeared in connection with #spring (see PDF):

Instagram wouldn’t be half the fun without the various filters to apply to the images. But #spring is best enjoyed in natural form. 28% of all #spring posts were posted without any additional filter:

  1. Normal (261)
  2. X-Pro II (91)
  3. Rise (83)
  4. Amaro (81)
  5. Lo-fi (68)
  6. Hefe (54)
  7. Earlybird (48)
  8. Hudson (41)
  9. Sierra (34)
  10. Valencia (33)

Telling stories with network data: Instagram in China

One of the most interesting sources of social media data right now is the iPhone based image sharing platform Instagram. This social networking platform is based on images, which can be compared with Flickr, but with Instagram the global dimension is much more visible. And because of the seamless Twitter and Facebook integration, the networking component is stronger. And it has a great API 😉

The first thing that came to my mind when looking at the many options, the API is providing to developers, has been the tags. In the Instagram application, there is no separate field for tagging your (or other peoples’) images. Instead you would write it in the comment field as you would do in Twitter. But the API allows to fetch data by hashtags. After reading this fascinating article (and looking at the great images) in Monocle about the northern Chinese city of Harbin, I wanted to learn more about the visual representation of this city in Instagram.

What I did was the following: I wrote a short Python program that fetched the 1.000 most recently posted images for any hashtag. As I could not get the two available Instagram Python modules to work properly, I wrote my own interface to Instagram based on pycurl. The data is then transformed into a network based on the co-occurence of hashtags for the images and saved in GraphML format with the Python module igraph. Other data (such as filters, users, locations etc.) that can be evaluated is saved in separate data sets. Here’s the network visualizations for China, Shanghai, Beijing, Hongkong, Shenzen and Harbin – not the whole network, but a reduced version only with the tags that were mentioned at least five times (click to enlarge):

I also calculated some interesting indicators for the six hashtags I explored:

The first thing to notice is that Harbin obviously is not as often being instagrammed as the Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hongkong or Beijing. An interesting indicator here is in the second data column: the daily number of images tagged with this location. Shenzhen seems to be the most active city with 3.4 images tagged “#shenzen”. Beijing is almost as active, while Shanghai is a bit behind. Finally, for Harbin, there’s not even one image every day. The unique tags is showing the diversity of hashtags used to describe images. Here, China is clearly in the lead. The next two indicators tell something about the connections between the tags: The density is calculated as the relation of actual to possible edges between the network nodes. Here, the smaller network of Harbin has the highest density and China and Shanghai the lowest. The average path length is a little below 2 for all hashtags.

Now, let’s take a look at the most frequently used hashtags:

What is interesting here: Harbin clearly does tell a story about snow, cold weather and a ice sculpture park, while Shanghai seems to be home for users frequently tagging themselves to advertise their instagramming skills (I marked the tags that refer to usernames with an asterisk). Most of the frequently used hashtags are Instagram lingo (instagood, instagram, ig, igers, instamood), refer to the equipment (iphonesia, iphoneography) or the region (china). Topical hashtags, that tell something about the city or the community can seldom be found in the top hashtags. Nonetheless, they are there. Here’s a selection of hashtags telling a story about the cities:

Finally, here is the most frequently liked image for each of the hashtags – to remind us that the numbers and networks only tell half the story. Enjoy and see if you can spot the ice sculptures in Harbin!

China:

Shanghai:

Beijing:

Hongkong:

Shenzhen:

Harbin: