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It’s always sunny in Yarmouth (according to Google Images): Visual representations of a semi-peripheral town.
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Department of Geography, Media and Communication (from 2013).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-8504-5691
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom .
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom .
2023 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

This study explores the visual representation of Great Yarmouth, a British coastal town caught between the urban and the rural, as seen through the quasi-monopolistic image search engine Google Images. The research examines levels of pluralistic or biased place representations to consider how rankings employed by Google Images algorithms represent Great Yarmouth’s identity. The study adopts a visual culture perspective that recognises the role of images in place making and combines digital methods with an image type analysis to investigate how online representations reflect and create the town’s identities. The data shows that Google Images’ preference for representing Yarmouth as a sunny seaside town indicates that the search engine prioritises marketable assets above its connections with its hinterland, its diversity of people, and the cultural activities it has to offer. This, the authors state, is a place far away from Tuan’s (1979) idea of a place that is given meaning and identity from the perspective of people. Instead, Google Images’ representations of Great Yarmouth are an example of a created form of place making as commodification. The article concludes that the inscribed bias and unbalanced search priority criteria employed by the search engine impact upon the diversity of the semi-peripheral town.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023.
Keywords [en]
Google Images, representation, algorithms, place making
National Category
Media and Communications
Research subject
Media and Communication Studies; Cultural studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-95054OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-95054DiVA, id: diva2:1763142
Conference
73rd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Toronto, Canada
Available from: 2023-06-06 Created: 2023-06-06 Last updated: 2023-06-19Bibliographically approved

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Brantner, Cornelia

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf