Mixed methods on Instagram research: Methodological challenges in data analysis and visualization

Abstract

In this article, we will present our insights on key methodological challenges emerged from the Selfiestories project, focused on selfies as personal narratives on Instagram. In this research, we approached the selfie practice in the context of user’s personal narratives (Georgakopoulou, 2016, From narrating the self to posting self(ies): A small stories approach to selfies. Open Linguistics 2(1): 300–317.) embedded in the everyday. We opted for a mixed methodology (Creswell and Creswell, 2017) resonating on the notion of remix (Markham, 2013, Remix cultures, remix methods: Reframing qualitative inquiry for social media contexts. In: Denzin N and Giardina M (eds) Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry. pp. 63–81.), thus combining fieldwork and ethnographic techniques with quantitative data obtained through an Instagram data extractor. This approach proved to be challenging in the process of establishing a dialogue between data sets of different nature. At this stage, we considered visualization as a valuable technique for analysis and communication, particularly in those case studies where fieldwork and data extraction from Instagram were conducted simultaneously. Decisions made regarding visualization processes posed different challenges regarding the intermingling of qualitative and quantitative data and the layout of our results. After a contextualization of our research and methodology, we will analyze the challenges and limitations of visualizations in our research. Taking into account the time-based dimension of personal narratives in Instagram, emphasized in some of our case studies, such as events, we will document our own process in looking for the best possible ways to present a more balanced account of our synchronous qualitative and quantitative data. We will do so against the temporal background of the experience of the first day of the Primavera Sound 2016, where we conducted fieldwork while extracting data from Instagram. After carrying out different tests with alternative visualization tools and formats, we chose to work with timeline tools, particularly those who offered a narrative layout against the backdrop of experience time. In a research where time and synchrony play a pivotal role, we suggest that adding a temporal dimension in visualization could be a way of connecting both perspectives, thus allowing to present different sources and types of data together, while also expanding the role that storytelling can play in visualizing data.