Zooming into Instagram City: Reading the Local through Social Media

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  50,000 Instagram photos from Tokyo, organized by brightness mean (radius) and hue mean (perimeter).

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  50,000 Instagram photos from Tokyo, organized by brightness mean (radius) and hue mean (perimeter). Close-up detail.

Authors

Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich

Article

Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich. Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the Local through Social Media. First Monday, 6/1/2013.

Abstract

How are users’ experiences of production, sharing, and interaction with the media they create mediated by the interfaces of particular social media platforms?

Watching the World

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  The world map of selfies. Part of the research project Selfiecity.net (2014). See more on the project’s web site Selfiecity.net.

Author

Lev Manovich

Article

Lev Manovich. Watching the World, Aperture 214, Spring 2014.

Abstract

The rise of “social photography,” pioneered by Flickr in 2005, has opened fascinating new possibilities for cultural research. The photo-universe created by hundreds of millions of people might be considered a mega-documentary, without a script or director, but this documentary’s scale requires computational tools—databases, search engines, visualization—in order to be “watched.”

Selfiecity investigates the Instagram self-representations in six cities around the world

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  A screenshot of Selfiexploratory, an interactive app we built for exploring the dataset of 3840 selfie photos. Access the app online to explore the Selfiecity dataset.

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  One of the imageplots presenting the findings of our research. Learn more on the project website http://selfiecity.net/.

Web site

http://selfiecity.net

Authors

Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Daniel Goddemeyer, Dominikus Baur, Jay Chow, Alise Tifentale, Mehrdad Yazdani, Nadav Hochman.

Description

Selfiecity.net investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods. It presents analysis and interactive visualizations of 3,200 single selfie photos from Instagram shared during December 5-12, 2013 in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and São Paulo.

The new 2015 edition, Selfiecity London, adds analysis of 640 selfies shared in London during September 21-27, 2015.

SelfieSaoPaulo, a Site-Specific Visualization of Selfies on Sao Paulo's Largest Media Facade

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  SelfieSaoPaulo presented on a larger media facade in the center of Sao Paolo.

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  SelfieSaoPaulo presented on a larger media facade in the center of Sao Paolo.

Images and Video

• SelfieSaoPaulo video
• SelfieSaoPaulo images set 1
• SelfieSaoPaulo images set 2

Authors

Moritz Stefaner, Jay Chow, Lev Manovich

Description

SelfieSaoPaulo is a site-specific projection commissioned for SP_Urban Festival. The project develops further the ideas from Selfiecity published earlier in 2014. Created by the larger team headed by Stefaner and Manovich, Selfiecity investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods. Presentation of the project includes high resolution visualizations showing patterns in 3200 Instagram selfie photos. Interactive Selfiexploratory allows website visitors to explore the selfies database in real-time, selecting the photos using geographic and demographic information, and face characteristics as analyzed by software.