Developing a Research Protocol for Instagram Stories

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Lucia Bainotti and Alessandro Gandini, who at presenting a tentative research protocol for studying Instagram stories. Stories are a means for sharing ephemeral content rather than permanent posts on the platform, and such ephemeral content has also become more popular across a wide range of other social media platforms. This represents an overall shift from an archival to a more ephemeral culture.

This shift needs to be addressed in the further development of digital methods approaches. Instagram stories can be understood as small social media stories that contain a plurality of digital objects including single images or videos, sequences of such content, and other textual or memetic content.

How can such content be collected and analysed, then? Instagram stories may be understood as representing everyday situations and situational practices; due to the affordances of the platform, however, they are also algorithmic situations and ephemeral situations. They represent an object to be followed, as well as a narration embedded in an algorithmic structure that responds to the affordances of the platform.

To illustrate, the project scraped and coded stories from the #happy and #fashion hashtags, focussing especially on micro-influencers; stories were coded for content format, composition and content, narrative style, and context of use. Various narrative styles emerged from this (from conversations to small stories), which generated different forms of interaction and enable a number of further analytical possibilities.

Further, the project scraped YouTube for videos tagged as ‘instagramstories’, and again coded these for a number of elements. This revealed various global and local channels that archive influencers’ Instagram stories, as well as videos that provided how-to advice on creating stories and using stories to game the Instagram algorithm.

Instagram stories are thus a form of algorithmic sociality, and the YouTube archives are a byproduct of the Instagram ranking cultures that have emerged, rather than simply archives for vernacular content.