In line with this collection’s goal of experimental play, we hope our readers will explore not only the methods and tutorials provided in many of this collection’s chapters but also the datasets and tutorial provided here. These features enable readers to explore the Obama Hope iconography, to use the archived data to address altogether new research questions, and/or to learn iconographic tracking strategies by following the provided tutorial. With this pragmatic addition, this digital book collection becomes an archive in and of itself, and we especially hope readers will test, adapt, and augment these tools to conduct their own future research.
The Tutorial page provides an overview of iconographic tracking and a step-by-step outline created by Laurie Gries explaining how to do iconographic tracking. It also offers a video tutorial, created by Kristina Bowers, showing how to code and visualize image data sets using Google Sheets and Atlas.ti. This tutorial is intended for researchers who are new to digital visual research
The Obama Hope Archive
The Obama Hope Archive, as described in the introduction, is an open access archive documenting the complex rhetorical life of the Obama Hope image. This archive is accessible on OSF, the Open Science Framework, an open source project management tool maintained by the Center for Open Science that enables scholars to share and build upon each other’s archives.
The Obama Hope Archive provides access to Laurie Gries' collection of web sources documenting Obama Hope originals, reproductions and remixes--data that informed many chapters in this collection as well as Gries own monograph, Still Life with Rhetoric, and subsequent work. This data set, made possible via iconographic tracking, contains hyperlinks to 1000 webpages that have been archived with archive.org's Wayback Machine, ensuring that the images are saved along with any other network/link metadata. As previously discussed in this collection, linkrot and post/page deletions represent real, material problems for digital visual researchers, and it is imperative to support and utilize tools like the Wayback Machine and OSF in preserving open data for research and collaboration.
To access the Obama Hope data set, visit the The Obama Hope Archive. Download the file named “ObamaHopedataset,” which is in csv format, and save it to your computer. You will then be able to open it in your preferred spreadsheet or analysis software and save it your computer. (For your convenience, you can access the csv file here: ObamaHopedataset.csv).
Obama Hope Tweets
The second dataset, curating all the Twitter posts mentioning Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope poster from 2008 to 2016, was produced using MassMine. As previously mentioned in this collection, MassMine is a data collection tool set, facilitating the collection of data from Twitter and other digital networks for interdisciplinary research. MassMine is currently funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and full user documentation, tutorials, and research examples are available at massmine.org. In addition to using MassMine to collect Twitter data, we have used DocNow's Tweet catalog to archive the tweet IDs for the Obama Hope related tweets.
To access the Obama Hope related tweets, please go to the DocNow Catalog page for the tweets: Obama Hope Tweets. You will need to rehydrate the tweets (using the Tweet ID's to collect full tweet data from Twitter's API) by using MassMine's twitter-rehydrate functionality.1 (DocNow also provides a rehydrate tool on their website.) For additional tutorials, please see MassMine's Twitter Analysis page.
We invite you to not only access The Obama Hope Archive and Obama Hope Tweets and use them for your own research purposes but also expand them by contributing your own data sets. Also, if you have not read the Afterword, we encourage you to do so. It is intended to encourage and inspire further experimentation in digital visual studies, and we hope the open access data sets will help make further experimentation with Obama Hope possible. Also, don’t forget to check out the tutorials included in many of the chapters as well as the tutorial page developed by Bowers for doing iconographic tracking. Best of luck!
1. Rehydration is required by Twitter in order to archive and share historical tweet data. This means that the actual archive of tweets we provide is only an archive of "tweet IDs," which are unique tweet identifiers that allow researchers to "rehydrate" their data collection. To rehydrate using Twitter's developer portal (API), researchers pass the unique list of tweet IDs to Twitter's API, and Twitter returns a full "hydrated" dataset containing information (tweet content, likes, user data, metadata, etc.) about the identified tweets in the archive.↩