Looking Outwards 9: Selfiecity (from Sihan)

While there are many interesting projects students chose to write about in the “Looking Outwards” posts, I was really interested in Sihan’s post about the Selfiecity project. The man behind the project, Dr. Lev Manovich, and his team are interested in examining the style of selfies in five cities – Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo. By poring through thousands of individual photos, the Selfiecity team has been able to uncover patterns on selfie styles, taking into account aspects such as head tilt, smile, age, gender, and more. For instance, it was found that in all cities, women took more selfies than men, and people in Moscow smiled the least.

Like Sihan, I would imagine that the face recognition algorithm behind the selfies would collect quantitative data (i.e. eye position in proportion to the face, head tilt angle, etc.). Although there has been extensive work done on this project, I think it’s difficult to concretely measure certain aspects of a person’s selfie, such as emotion. I also think it would be interesting for the team to create visualizations of people’s selfies by gender, as I would imagine that men and women may also take selfies in different styles.