SelfieCity is a website created by Dr. Lev Manovich. He and his team started this project in order to learn more about the culture and science of selfie taking. Selfies have become a huge part of 21st century culture and they wanted to explore how selfies differ between different cities across the world. This site is interesting to anyone who has taken a selfie or has interest in this new selfie phenomenon.
He and his team used Amazon Mechanical Turks to do their busy work for them to make this project possible. These Turks are essentially random people who have gone onto Amazon’s website and volunteered to perform a variety of mundane tasks that computers cannot yet do. For this project, they needed people to identify which from a selection of pictures were selfies as well as the gender and approximate age of the selfie takers. If the SelfieCity team had done this instead of giving it to the Turks, this project would have likely taken a lot longer.
Once they had their groups of selfies picked out, they also ran a digital facial analysis on the photos to determine the mood, face position, head tilt angle, and other information about the selfies. They organized all of their findings in a series of appropriate visuals. They even created a Selfiexploritory, where users can sort through photos by looking at them through a series of filters based on these different aspects (head tilt, mood, mouth open/closed, subject wearing glasses, etc.).
Through this project Dr. Manovich and his team were able to recognize several trends in selfies and their photographers throughout the world. They noted that in every city, more women took selfies than men. They also determined that younger people an average take more selfies (the median age of selfie takers is 23.7 years old). They also determined Bangkok to be the ‘smiliest’ city based on this collection of selfies, and that Moscow residents smile least. The team also wrote several essays based upon related research. They discussed how the selfie phenomenon has affected modern culture and society’s ideas about self-image.
One of the weaknesses of this project is the use of the Mechanical Turks. It would have been extremely time-consuming for the team to sort through the photos on their own, but it also would have eliminated some potential for error or variance. It is difficult based on just a photo to determine the age or gender of the subject and they relied on a series of strangers to do so. The use of the digital facial recognition is also a weakness. When it comes to technology, there is always an added element of potential error. Some of the measured angles might have been off or the measure of smiles might have been difficult to compare between pictures taken in different environments by different people.
One of the strengths of this project is their attempt to make up for these potential errors. They cut down their total group of pictures from each city (from 1000 to 640) in order to cut out some of the error. They also sent some of the pictures to multiple Mechanical Turks in order to ensure the results were more accurate. The visual appeal of the presentation of this project is also a strength. Its visual layout is very cohesive and organized. The modern style of how it was presented goes well with the modern trend of the selfies and draws in the intended audience because of that.
This project applied several scholarly primitives, the biggest being comparing. They compared all of the selfies with each other in order to recognizer overall trends. They also did some sampling, as they only used a part of their original groups of collected photos.
