SDA Vision — exploring images together
A community workshop tool for examining AI-generated and traditional media. Participants notice details, discuss interpretations, check evidence and reflect on what changed their view.
Explore SDA VisionWho is behind SAM?
Meet Dr Sam Martin.
Digital sociologist. Researcher. Creator of SAM.
I'm Sam. I develop methods and tools for making sense of complex qualitative material, with the people, questions and contexts behind it always in view.
The story behind SAM
Eight years of independent making.
Over the past eight years, I have developed SAM independently, between research roles and in evenings and weekends. That sustained work became the foundation of BigQualDataLabs and SAM's own intellectual property. My university roles and current Smart Data Research UK Fellowship form another strand of my working life; SAM has its own development story.
How I work
Research starts with people.
My work explores how digital conversations shape what people believe, trust and do, particularly around health. I combine large-scale social-media research with close qualitative reading and community participation to understand how meaning travels and why context matters.
I hold a Smart Data Research UK Fellowship at Manchester Metropolitan University and am also based at the Vaccines and Society Unit in the Oxford Vaccine Group. My research investigates vaccine hesitancy, digital misinformation and the ways AI-generated images enter public debate.
My wider work includes research at Oxford and UCL, co-creating the LISTEN framework for collaborative Big Qual analysis, and developing visual AI literacy resources with communities. Across these settings, I care about whose experience is heard, how interpretations are reached and whether research is useful beyond the academic paper.
From questions to practice
Why I built SAM.
Working with a large collection should still leave room for careful reading, disagreement and discovery. I built SAM around that practical challenge: helping researchers move between patterns across a collection and the individual accounts that give those patterns meaning.
Through SAM and my teaching, I want to make that work more approachable for researchers, evaluators, practitioners and students. The tools can help organise, compare and explore; the research question and interpretive decisions remain yours.
Another strand of my work
Explore my wider research.
Alongside my independent work on SAM, I develop academic and community projects that explore how we interpret images, weigh evidence and learn together. Here are two examples from that wider research.
Hearsay Harbour — learning through play
A game within the SDA Vision project that turns questions about images into an island adventure. Players compare explanations, investigate source clues and reconsider what they would share.
Visit Hearsay Harbour