Investigating the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world.
By Mattias Morrison, EECO 503
The Age of Personalization: The Importance of Beautiful and Immersive Data Visualization
A diverse team of researchers representing neurosciences, cognitive science, data management, programming, design and visualization converged on what I think is a fascinating topic, especially considering our present age of personalization (and narcissism?). The selfie.
This team used academic research methods for a selfie photo dataset and discovered interesting findings such as head-tilt angle by city, smile distribution, demographic metrics and more. Authors reflected on these data and findings and wrote essays, one notably titled, “The Selfie: Making sense of the “Masturbation of Self-Image” and the “Virtual Mini-Me”
These findings are interesting, yet I am more intrigued by how wonderfully this website allows for an immersive user experience, and how beautiful data is visualized. By contrast, many of the academic articles I have been reading during this MAEEC residency do a terrible job of displaying data, utilizing only ASCII text and greyscale bar and line graphs. The capital letter X makes many sad appearances in data tables. I don’t even try to visually interpret these data; I feel forced to rely on the author’s written interpretation, which makes me feel less engaged as a learner. Shouldn’t authors care about how their precious, hard-won data is visualized? My sense is that academics need to consider visual design because it impacts reader engagement.
The SelfieCity website is clean and beautiful to look at, but the real experience is exploring the data collected from the 3200 selfies from 5 international studies. Click here for the experience.
Clearly, the fact that I was so thrilled by an opportunity to manipulate data emphasizes the fact that I am affected by our age of media personalization. I want to understand and interpret the findings through my own experience. My second self-observation underscores the added value of not only making data interactive or immersive, but making it beautiful and understandable. Clear organization by tabs, artful and accurate representation without appearing cluttered or busy.
In our culture of individualization and personalization, my sense is that mediated experiences that are beautiful may lead to higher levels of engagement. Academics involved in quantitative research methods could learn how to respond to this new environment.
