Introduction to the Special Issue on Images as Data

Visual information (primarily still images and videos) is crucial for the study of many current communications, political, and social phenomena. Yet research leveraging large corpora of visuals to answer social science questions is still scarce, especially relative to the explosion of research using “big data” text-as-data methods. This special issue fosters innovative theoretical and methodological research in the area of images as data. The featured articles use computational methods to analyze, from a social science perspective, large quantities of images as well as videos.