Whose cancer? Visualising the distribution of mentions to cancer sites on instagram

Abstract

This article presents a quantitative analysis of mentions to cancer on Instagram. Using thousands of images with cancer-related hashtags, we build several visualisations to capture their distribution. Source images are clustered by their visual traits and by the incidence, prevalence, and mortality of the cancer site they refer to. Our goal is three-fold: to provide a quantitative basis for future research on the representation of cancer online; to offer an interpretation of the sources of the imbalanced representation of the different cancer sites; and to motivate a debate on how that representation may affect patients and families.

Keywords:

• Health communication
• public understanding of science and technology
• visual communication
• social media and cancer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Findings from our study for Instagram do not reveal the same distribution for Instagram mentions, as can be seen in the results section.

2 While it started as a movement to give visibility to prostate cancer, the Movember movement encourages men to grow a moustache or a beard as a show of support to issues related to men’s mental and physical health more generally. See www.movember.com for more information.

3 Spanish social media served as a starting point, expanding the search globally in subsequent phases.

4 The American spelling for leukaemia was selected as it returned a higher number of hits. Some of these types of cancer returned virtually no results, but the list was based on metrics of prevalence and mortality for each type of cancer, to test whether high prevalence translated into high presence in social media.

5 Mainly ImageMeasure, bundled in the ImagePlot pack provided at http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html

6 For instance, Pertl, Quigley and Hevey (2014) reflect on this challenge when discussing cancer-related fatigue and how it contradicts social discourses related to survivorship.

7 Much work has been done on this issue with relation to breast cancer. See Sweeney and Killoran-McKibbin (2016) or King (2008).