Thomas Smits

2023

1. Distant Reading 940,000 Online Circulations of 26 Iconic Photographs

   Thomas Smits, and Ruben Ros

   New Media & Society, Dec 2023

   Abs

   How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? Recent studies have suggested that online circulation, especially in a memeified form, might lead to the erosion, fracturing, or collapsing of the original contextual meaning of iconic pictures. Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. The article demonstrates that constantly changing configurations of contextual imagetexts, self-referential image-texts, and non-referential image/texts shape the online live of iconic photographs: ebbs and flows of slowly disappearing, suddenly resurfacing, and newly found meanings. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say.

2020

1. The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870

   Thomas Smits

   Dec 2020

   Abs

   This book looks at the roots of a global visual news culture: the trade in illustrations of the news between European illustrated newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. In the age of nationalism, we might suspect these publications to be filled with nationally produced content, supporting a national imagined community. However, the large-scale transnational trade in illustrations, which this book uncovers, points out that nineteenth-century news consumers already looked at the same world. By exchanging images, European illustrated newspapers provided them with a shared, transnational, experience.