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Algorithmic iconography: Intersections between iconography and social media image research

63% of social media consists of images: about 2,000,000,000 pictures are shared daily. I use iconography to understand why people find some pictures more resonant than others. As a case study, I examine the 1,000 most widely-shared tweets arising from the refugee crisis arising from the death of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee child found drowned on a Turkish beach in 2015.