The Big Picture: A Visual Exploration of the Reciprocal Image of Italy and China through Search Engines Giulio Fagiolini Politecnico di Milano Via Durando 10 20158 Milano +39 0223997813 giulio.fagiolini@mail.polimi.it Paolo Ciuccarelli Politecnico di Milano Via Durando 10 20158 Milano +39 0223997813 paolo.ciuccarelli@polimi.it YANG Lei Chinese Museum of Digital Art Fuxing Road 9A Haidian District, Beijing +86 1059802310 yanglei@modachina.org ABSTRACT This experiment consists in the collection, categorisation and vi- sualisation of 4,800 images from the reciprocal national internet domains of Italy and China. The digital world is here considered not only in terms of the impact of new technologies on social life, but also as a resource for the real world as a political and social space[11]. In a context where the language barrier presents a big obstacle, images can be a medium for cultural analysis by exploi- ting both their visual properties and their intrinsic storytelling capabilities[8]. Thanks to today’s massive data production, we are now able to conduct analyses that were not possible before. This experiment is an attempt to investigate how two radically different cultures see each other through the images collected on the web. The visual characteristics of these artefacts, together with the uses to which they are put, provide a valuable tool for the investigator. We hope that this work will provide insight into the big picture for the general reader while offering the specialist a practical tool to test hypotheses and intuitions. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Miscellane- ous. H.3.7 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Digital Libraries – Collection. J.4.7 [Social and Behavioural Sciences]: Sociology. General Terms Measurement, Documentation, Design, Experimentation. Keywords Digital Methods, Data Visualization, Cultural Analytics. 1. INTRODUCTION The aim of the project was to examine the peculiarities of the narrative of both countries in one another’s web space. The expo- nential growth of non-professional and professional media pro- ducers has created a new cultural situation as well as a challenge to our normal ways of tracking and studying culture[3]. Thanks to this massive production of data we were able to make a number of analyses that were not possible previously. The questions we were interested in were, first, whether we could use the collection of images found in the reciprocal web of Italy and China as a tool to investigate the perception of respective national identities, and, second, what kind of insights these images would provide. 2. MEANING OF IDENTITY The word “identity” envelops manifold meanings. We will use “national identity” specifically to refer to the concept of type iden- tity: labels applied to persons (and in this case nations) who share or are thought to share some characteristics in appearance, beha- vioural traits, beliefs, attitudes, values, knowledge, opinions, ex- perience, historical commonalities, and so on. Since the concept of “national identity” also acts as a social category[1], it is subject to the products of human thinking, discourse, and action. This makes the meaning of “national identity” variable over time and location, and therefore it follows that the result of our analysis is valid strictly for the moment in which it was made and for the place in which it was made. Dialogic processes can serve to de- termine such identities (as do forms of communication and inte- raction between nations) by giving others a method of defining a perceived national identity. Understanding communication as a dialogic process allows us to extract information on the subjects involved, the perceiver and the perceived. 3. CHINA AND ITALY China has always been a vast territory with a strong cultural iden- tity, historically powered by the heritage of written tradition[6]. Chinese culture has developed independently from the west for thousands of years. Despite China’s long history of strong trade relations, it is only after the reforms carried out under Deng Xiao- ping in the 1980s that China began opening her doors to the rest of the world[6]. In order to manage these transitions and changes without losing its role, the government exerts strict control over the media and the web. The result is an incredibly complex socie- ty that, while extremely dynamic and futuristic, remains essential- ly separated from the rest of the world. Bearing this in mind, what really makes China an interesting country for this experiment is the cultural barrier created by the language. On the other side we have Italy, a country with a media landscape similar to many of the non-English-speaking western countries. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.