Disassembling and rebuilding: how anonymity is pictured on the web?

Introduction

Studying the controversy theme through general queries, clearly appeared that the freedom of expression is often used as an example of the good qualities about online anonymity. Google Images is the experimentation field that had been chosen for this fourth chapter.

Which is the general perception about anonymity in its graphic representations? The decision to investigate the iconographic point of view was made to understand if by googling the simple word "anonymity" there would appear in some ways the freedom of expression. The research was made through different countries' Google dominions with the relative translation of the associated query. Are there differences between the phenomena visualization in different countries?

How to read the visualization

This visualization could be considered as a glossary of the possible elements used to represent anonymity. Clicking the buttons on the top, the images will appear on the screen. The buttons are a sort of filters through which it's easy to navigate into the visualization to understand which are the possible elements composing the pictures scraped from the first 100 items of each research per country.

In this kind of visualization it was not important to show the differences between countries' results because its purpose is to let the reader understand the type of the images linked to anonymity representation. All the countries selected for this research presented similar results and for this visualization some sample images had been chosen from all the 1100 results avoiding the division into groups. This visualization could be seen as a useful tool to understand how anonymity is pictured on the web and to discover which are the possible combinations of the pictures' elements.

How it has been done

Studying the images emerged from the queries' formulation some elements were particularly recurring. In order to create this visualization, it has been taken a sample of each image. Each picture has been analyzed disassembling it like a puzzle in which the pieces were the single objects separated from their previous composition.

The element's name has been used as a filter (the buttons on the top) and each element could be added to another filter showing a different result. If the combination gives no results, this means that there is no picture containing both elements. An example could be the following: Clicking "person" all the pictures containing a person will appear; adding the filter "covered face" the visualization shows all the pictures containing a person with the face covered by something; adding the filter "mask" all the images containing a person with the face covered by a mask will be displayed and so on.

Findings

This "picture glossary" is an important instrument to understand the rest of the research. It is useful to understand all the elements which can be used to compose a picture representing anonymity.

What it is easy to see is that a picture from this query formulation can be made representing a person, an animal or a robot. That one of these three subject can be covered by a mask, a shopping bag, a balaclava or something else. Or can be understandable that the subject of the image can be faceless or deleted by pixels or blur; and that there are some elements, as question mark, fingerprints or computers that can accompany some other objects in a picture.

Metadata

Timestamp: 18/12/2014

Data source: Google Images

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