There’s a lot more behind selfies than just choosing the right filter or getting a ton of Instagram likes. A revolutionary project known as Selfiecity investigated and analyzed 3,200 selfies taken in New York, Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok and Sao Paulo to determine the statistics behind 2013’s word of the year.
The project was first launched in fall 2013 by Nadav Hochman, Lev Manovich and Jay Chow, who analyzed 2.3 million Instagram photos from all over the world. Along with Daniel Goddemeyer of Digital Thought Facility, the team then chose five cities to focus on and partnered with Gnip (the world’s largest provider of social data) to develop software to turn the photos into visualizable data. The data was split into six sections called Intro, Imageplots, Selfiexploratory, Dataset, Findings and Theory.
Selfiecity’s research showed that significantly more women take selfies than men. In Moscow, there are 4.6 times more female selfies than male selfies! As you would expect, most selfies are taken by younger people; 23.7 is the estimated median age. The team even found the “average smile scores” of each city, with Bangkok and San Paulo taking the lead. Finally, the data showed that women strike more extreme poses in their selfies, a statistic that was found by measuring the average head-tilt angles.
“SelfieCity zooms in on the individual person, his story and context,” said Goddemeyer and Moritz Stefaner, two of the core team members. “Rather than being an endpoint, or completely finished project, Selfiecity aims to provide a starting point for this ‘intimate’ analysis and storytelling with pictures as data material.”