Hypothesis 4: The vast majority (90%) of the hashtags will fall into the thematising or like-hunter categories, while unique

hashtags will represent only a small minority (10%). A large number of hashtags is expected to refer to the manner the photo was created

Analysing the corpus, the originally planned three categories (thematising, like-hunter, unique hashtags) had to be completed with another three: hashtags in-dicating group identity, hashtags describing how the picture was created, and hashtags that did not fit into any category and were meaningless for outsiders without a context, though not necessarily containing unique words (e�g�: #N16,

#is, #and, #get)�

Thematising context-marker hashtags dominate the sample (83%)� Similarly to posted pictures, these were characterised by seasonality: keywords like autumn, fall, halloween, pumpkin appeared in such high numbers as the sample was taken in late October�

A user’s popularity is measured with the number of its followers and thus the number of user interactions it can achieve� In the case of the Instagram profile of companies, products and brands, the large number of followers enhances the ef-ficiency of advertising and helps reaching the highest possible number of potential customers� For this reason, there were many (55 different types, 230 with repeti-tions) hashtags which encouraged following in several forms (e�g�: #followme, #fol-low, #follow4fol#fol-low, #followback, #followmeplease)� Similarly, hashtags encouraging users to like or share the post (#like, #likesplease, #likeitplease, #likeme, #likemy-photo; #pleaseshare) also aim to popularise the posted information reaching as many users as possible, and are often based on mutuality: like is offered for a like or a follower (#like4like, #likesforlikes, #likeforfollow)� Hashtags reflecting on the

#time, #truth, #tradition� An image-text relationship on Instagram 147 phenomenon of hashtagging can be taken as meta-hashtags�⁵ Hashtags referring to joining to a community also serve the spreading of the content (e�g�: #poetry-community, #PoetsofInstagram; #instaitalia)�

Usually, unique hashtags are not only made of set phrases or collocations (#goodfood, #goodgirl, #goodlife, #goodvibes) but they are also created by writing a longer syntactic unit, even a full sentence, as one word� The sample comprised 154 unique hashtags (e�g�: #gottadowhatyougottado, #StillAKidAtHeart, #tellme-whatyoudask, #whereisthebagelemoji)� Although they are not totally unique, im-peratives and good advices constitute a separate group (e�g�: #thinkaboutit, #riseup,

#neverstopexploring, #livethemoment)�

Meta-information about creating the pictures was expected to be much more dominant in the corpus: only 50 types (with 102 occurrences) were found in this category (e�g�: #vscocam, #photoshoot, #nofi lter, #blackandwhite, #canon; cf�

Schrey 2015)�

3.5 Hypothesis 5: The examined pictures are expected to be mostly about people, followed by objects and animals in order. As a sub-hypothesis, selfies are expected to represent 20% of the pictures depicting people (cf. Wendt 2014)

The biggest thematic group contained indeed photos of people (138 out of 400)�

Of this, 43 evidently or admittedly (according to the hashtags) qualifies as selfie�

This rate, however, surpassed my expectations: 31% of the pictures taken of people are self-portraits� Surprisingly though, only 11 of the 43 selfies reflected explicitly on the act of taking a selfie with the hashtag #selfie�

The second largest group of pictures depicted objects (furniture, books, etc)�

Probably, the keyword #truth resulted in the high number of posts displaying texts (memes, quotes) as images� Further categories deal with food and beverage (often hashtagged as #foodie by analogy with selfie), nature, built environment and animals� Surprisingly, the traditional composition of a person posing with a famous touristic site in the background was quite rare in the sample (note that this would have been one of the most dominant composition if the keyword #travel or #travelgram had been used)�

5 An example: #lookatthecutekittenontherightalsoextralonghashtagsrule�

4. Conclusion

I used three keywords matching the theme of the VLL conference to describe the relationship between pictures and hashtags, these new-type minimalistic texts which are similar to subtitles but have many different functions compared to them� Quantitative and qualitative analysis of small data was carried out to test the validity of five hypotheses�

The first hypothesis, which expected to find many spelling variants and syno-nyms among the hashtag chains consisting of an average of eleven hashtags, was mainly confirmed: the pictures in the corpus were accompanied by an average of 12 hashtags, which however, indeed included synonymous words and mor-phological variants� The second hypothesis, which expected an overwhelming dominance of English hashtags, was clearly justified with a 90% rate� The third hypothesis relied on previous observations when expecting that Instagram sub-titles mostly follow the pattern of “unlinked text + independent hashtags”� The fourth hypothesis was based on the results of former hashtag analyses� Accord-ing to my results the three categories (thematisAccord-ing, like-hunter, unique hashtags) should be completed with at least three further categories (hashtags marking group identity, hashtags indicating how the picture was created and unclassifiable hashtags)� The highest number of items belonged to the category of contextualis-ing hashtags which verbally represent the content of the photo, while technical meta-information relating to the taking of the photo was not so characteristic than it seemed to be prior to the analysis� The analysis of the fifth hypothesis applied a semiotic approach, focusing on the connection between the content of the photos and the accompanying hashtags� More than one third of the pictures depicted people, and of this, one third qualified as selfie though seldom indicating this fact with the #selfie hashtag�

As it has been emphasized earlier, my results on frequency of occurrence are valid only to this corpus and were meant to complete the theme of the conference�

However, hashtag types, subtitle patterns and the very strong co-occurrence of words having the same semantic field in a hashtag chain are results that can be generalised� Further examinations may deal with the co-occurrence of certain elements in hashtag chains from a semantic aspect and the grammatical analysis of neologisms and word formation methods in Instagram-related texts�

#time, #truth, #tradition� An image-text relationship on Instagram 149

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