Google Images, Climate Change, and the Disappearance of Humans

Summary

In this contribution, we present a visual approach to study the development of the online representation of climate change. We collected ranked image lists over a twelve years span on Google Image Search, and analyzed them with a two-fold visualization: an image timeline of the top 5 images per year and an area bump chart showing the top 10 tags automatically detected by the computer vision algorithm in the larger dataset of the top 100 results per year. We can draw two main conclusions from these results. First, the artificial separation between climate change and humans identified in previous studies of climate change imagery is being perpetuated and reinforced on one of the most important digital locations for visual culture: Google Images. Second, that there is a notable homogeneity within the corpus of images, as well as stability over time.