Journey of an Image: big data, social media and how ideas spread. 1000 years, 5 minutes. It took us around 1000 years to accept the idea that it’s okay to take a picture of your lunch, or stretch your arm in improbable ways to take a bad picture of your face in a public toilet. The roots of the everydayfication of visual representation can be traced back to Tristan and Iseult, a 12th century tale that, through a story of adulterous love between cornish knight Tristan and irish princess Iseult, popularizes the idea of romantic love, earthly love, as opposed to heavenly love and love of God. In this talk, Francesco D’Orazio runs through a millennium in... a little over 18 minutes.

Francesco D’Orazio is a researcher and product designer with a social science and digital media background. He specialises in futures research and in exploring the opportunities emerging at the intersection of social software, data science and audience behaviour. He has a PhD in Social Sciences and Digital Media (2004-2007) from Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’. He is the Co-founder and Vice President of Product at audience intelligence firm Pulsar and Co-founder of the Visual Social Media Lab. His work focuses on designing systems and research frameworks that help analyze social data and extract insights from the web in real time using computational social science and data visualisation. Most of his research work on social data has been focusing on virality, social influence, content diffusion and audience insights.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx