The article concludes with some reflections on the assets and potential of the method proposed. The article presents the process of conducting VNA by focusing on four key steps: collecting and coding relational data visualizing network diagrams through software analyzing the form of these diagrams and interpreting the resulting visualizations by offering narrative readings of these forms (focused on the effects they generate). To that effect, VNA adopts the notion ‘network’ as a method (rather than as a structural representation of social life) that allows to trace the complex entanglements by means of which specific practices are constituted. VNA provides innovative tools for qualitatively analyzing social situations by constructing, analyzing and interpreting visual networks based on tailored observatory and/or interview techniques. Both approaches consider both human and nonhuman entities in social practices, and adopt a relational perspective in order to study these practices. This article presents a qualitative research method, Visual Network Analysis (VNA), which is theoretically situated within the relational turn, and more particularly within sociomaterial and sociotopological approaches. We found visual patterns that co-occur with certain collective combinations of buttons, displaying how sociotechnical features shape the discursive frameworks of online publics. Bridging the study of platform affordances and affect theory, this article presents a novel methodology that repurposes Facebook reactions to infer collective attitudes and performative emotional expressions vis-à-vis images shared on the large Syrian Revolution Network public page (+2M). However, images circulating social media can (and should) be analyzed on the level of their audience. Studying images on social media introduces several challenges that relate to the size of data sets and the different meaning-making grammars of social visuality or, as aptly pointed out by others in the field, it means "studying the qualitative on a quantitative scale." Although cultural analytics provides an automated process through which patterns can be detected in many images, this methodology doesn't account for other modalities of the image than the image itself.
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