Visual narratives of disaster on Instagram: a multimodal AI-assisted analysis

This paper explores Instagram as a platform for visual and emotional narratives of disaster across the response and recovery phases. Focusing on the extreme flooding that affected western Germany in July 2021, the study analyzes approximately 2,700 Instagram posts collected over a three-year period. It employs a mixed-methods approach combining generative artificial intelligence with qualitative and quantitative analyses. Images were interpreted by ChatGPT-4 under human supervision, and the resulting classifications were validated against manual coding, yielding an agreement rate of 80.73% and a Cohen’s kappa of 0.74. Six visual themes were identified: flood damage, rescue operations, solidarity and resilience, media coverage, post-disaster recovery, and government involvement. The temporal distribution of these themes traces a movement from immediate impacts toward reconstruction and remembrance, while the emotional tone shifts from despair and anxiety toward more consistent expressions of hope. A statistically significant association was found between visual themes and emotional tones. A complementary thematic examination of hashtags shows how public discourse surrounding the disaster was framed, and indicates that images convey a more nuanced understanding of disaster impacts that hashtags alone cannot capture. The study demonstrates how AI-assisted visual analysis can facilitate the large-scale interpretation of social media image corpora and generate insights relevant to disaster response and recovery strategies.