SelfiExploratory: A data project all about our vain selfies

Mobile messaging is becoming more and more popular each day, so you know what that means? More messages! Well yeah, but also, more SELFIES.

Call them silly, call them pointless, call them vain, but there’s been a lot of discussion over the past year or so about selfies, our selfie-snapping habits, why we take them in the first place and the psychology behind them.

Now a new data project called SelfiExploratory is here to delve deeper into the selfie phenomenon than ever before.

Developed over at SelfiCity, the project claims to use a range of “theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods” to analyse our selfies. These findings are then presented as fancy data visualisations, which you can then divide up and view by all kinds of factors, like held tilt amount, smile, location and gender.

And what interesting things can you learn from the data? Well, it depends how much time you have on your hands, but interestingly we take selfies less than we think, only around 5% of images from each city were selfies, and women are more keen on snapping their faces than men, especially in Moscow where women take 4.6 times more than the dudes.

At the moment the data is only tracked from Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paulo, but if you’re interested in finding out more about our fascination with the selfie then it’s well worth a visit on your lunch break.