What Makes Photo Cultures Different?

Miriam Redi, Damon Crockett, Lev Manovich, Simon Osindero

Abstract: Billions of photos shared online today are created by people with different socio-economic characteristics living in different locations. We introduce a number of methods for quantifying the differences between such "photo cultures" and apply them to a large collection of Instagram images shared in five mega-cities around the world. First, we extract image content and style features and use them to design a new visualization technique for qualitative analysis of photo cultures. We then use supervised learning to automatically recognize and compare visual activity at different locations and expose surprising connections between geographically distant photo cultures. Finally, we perform a low-level quantitative analysis to understand what makes photo cultures different from each other.

External IDs:dblp:conf/mm/RediCMO16