What researchers can learn from the #selfie
Source: City University of New York
James Franco has mastered it and the Oxford Dictionary declared it 2013′s word of the year ― now a group of researchers has turned to the selfie, analyzing thousands in an effort to unearth what we could learn from them.
Over the past six months, City University of New York computer science professor Lev Manovich and a team of researchers analyzed thousands of Instagram photos from five cities, mining the data for visual cues and evidence of what selfies might say more broadly about the people in them. The resulting website, Selfiecity, is a mix of research findings, interactive data visualizations and theoretical essays.
Researchers randomly selected 120,000 photos from Instagram and worked with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers to identify which were selfies. From there, automatic face analysis established algorithmic estimations of eye, nose and mouth positions, the degrees of different emotional expressions, and so on.
Some of the findings are pretty interesting. For one, while there are more than 80 million photos on Instagram with the hashtag #selfie (even more with hashtags such as #selfienation and #selfiesunday), selfies account for a far fewer portion of images on Instagram than one might assume ― only about three to five percent.
Other interesting tidbits: the majority of selfie snappers are women, especially so in Moscow, where more than 80 percent of selfies feature women. But more older men take selfies ― the average age of men was higher than women in every city. Moscow was also the least smiley city, according to the analysis.
What is less clear, at the moment, are the greater truths researchers might discover in study of the selfie.
“A selfie might make everything clear in an instant,” James Franco wrote in the New York Times last year, contemplating their meaning. “Selfies are tools of communication more than marks of vanity (but yes, they can be a little vain).”
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