What Type of Data Are Images?

Images are an intriguing source of data for social scientists. Increasingly, the phrase “images as data” implies big data, digitized images, and quantitative analyses with elements of machine learning. This perspective, however, obscures the many other ways to conceive of what images are as data for social scientists. For example, big data, machine learning image researchers rely on labeled data to build classification algorithms. The process of labeling the data is essentially content analysis, a familiar tool to qualitative researchers. Thus, quantitative analyses are built on qualitative approaches, and both are a potentially valid way to use images to better understand the world. This chapter reviews current trends in images-as-data research while considering how the complicated nature of meaning derived from images lends itself to a pluralistic research approach. The chapter provides four guiding questions to use when embarking on or evaluating image research in political science.