The Key Elements and Structures of Art Organizations’ Social Representations on Visual Social Media: Clustering and Correspondence Analyses

Social media can be valuable tools for art organizations, as the posts uploaded to their accounts can manifest their perspectives on organizational goals and activities. In particular, visual materials are playing a crucial role in organizational social media communication. They can manifest the social representations (SRs), which are systems of opinions, knowledge, and/or beliefs shared by a group of people. Based on the social representations theory, this study was conducted to identify the key elements and structures of visual SRs in art organizations’ Instagram photos via computational analyses. Specifically, the major content of the photos was determined through photo classification and content tagging, and words embedded in the photos were detected using an optical character recognition technique. Clustering analysis was used to compare content, embedded words, and pixel-level features between the resulting groups. Correspondence analyses were performed at the account level to establish the representational fields. The results showed that text and people were the major types of objects represented in art organizations’ Instagram photos. The texts presented in the photos were mainly about organization names, information about events, and calling for actions of the public. Moreover, representation of texts and people emerged as key factors structuring the fields of visual SRs at the account level. The results suggest that organizational facets were more emphasized than artistic facets in art organizations’ strategic use of visual social media. The implications of these findings were discussed, along with the limitations and suggestions for future research.