Anonymous faces

Protocol

Introduction

Anonymity does not have a universal regulation on the web. From the previous protocol it has been found that anonymity is forbidden in China and South Korea, that Canada has a right to anonymity online, while Europe and US rely on their constitutions. So the question is: what is the perception of this theme through images in these countries according to the web, in particular through Google images? Are these images very different from country to country? And which are the dominating ones?

anonymous faces: exploring the images scenario

The chosen query was simply the word "anonymity" for not orientating the results with our focus and to see instead if and how free expression is included in this sphere. The aim was to explore the images popularity in the different countries, in particular in those ones emerged in the research. So the query has been translated in seven different languages. Using Kimono, the first 100 results for each of the 12 hosts have been scraped and together they have composed the corpus (for .ca it has been decided to formulate the query both in english and french extracting the first 50 links for each one). Then each picture has been tagged for the elements it is composed of (e.g. man + covered face + Guy Fawkes mask) in order to return only what can be seen without any interpretation. The aim of the first visualization is to better clarify what kind of images the elements we tagged can include and it works as a sort of legend for the following visualization. This last one wants to give an overview of these single elements showing how they link each others and where they are positioned according to the top 100.

Metadata

Timestamp:
18/12/2014

Data source:
Google Images

Tools:
Kimono, Table2Net, Gephi, DownThemAll

project by

  • Luca Alberton
  • Marta Ambrosetti
  • Giulia De Rossi
  • Cecilia Della Longa
  • Valeria Quircio

Faculty

  • Paolo Ciuccarelli
  • Marco Fattore
  • Stefano Mandato
  • Donato Ricci
  • Salvatore Zingale

Teaching Assistants

  • Matteo Azzi
  • Daniele Ciminieri
  • Michele Mauri
  • Azzurra Pini
  • Giorgio Uboldi