Tag Archives: Visual Sociology
A Picture of the Sociology Society at City College in New York
On February 14, 1949, Jackie Robinson spoke to the Sociology Society at City College in New York. It was 31 months after he became the first African American player in modern professional baseball and in the same year that he … Continue reading
Cities, Nature, and Mental Health
Is a walk in the woods good for you? It used to be a part of everyday life for people all over the world, but as civilization has progressed and people mostly live in urban areas, contact with nature has … Continue reading
Photos as Data
Do you store your photos on Google Photos? Do you know that Google doesn’t just store, it also analyzes? It scans pictures to identify such features as what you are wearing, what you are doing, and whether you are with … Continue reading
Affective Realism?
Is seeing believing? It’s natural to feel that when we observe events, or conduct lengthy interviews to learn what people saw or heard, we’re learning about the social world as it “really is.” But recent experiments by psychologists demonstrate a … Continue reading
Movie “Facts” … or Fantasy?
Movies based on true stories often gain a wide audience. Selma. American Sniper. The Theory of Everything. The Imitation Game. I think you could call each of them a great movie. But how accurate are they? Research by psychologists has … Continue reading
Drinking on YouTube?
With the advent of YouTube videos, how can the methods of visual sociology do anything but increase in popularity? But do videos show us a representative slice of the social world? Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh concluded that what … Continue reading
Measurement Validity for Twitter?
Twitter messages are being used increasingly to track public mood and interests. Social media and Big Data enthusiasts–and those of us who care about measurement validity–will be interested to know that a new investigation provides evidence of the validity of … Continue reading
Facelessness and Social Research
Is “the world of faces” dissonant from “the world without faces”? This question is posed in a New York Times article on the social problem created by our ability to communicate directly with others through social media without actually seeing … Continue reading
The Person Particle?
We all value our individuality, so it might be disconcerting to know that in new research about crowd behavior, some physicists have improved understanding of human behavior by thinking of people as particles. Using cameras and analyses of big data sets … Continue reading
Secret photographing of classes at Harvard??
Maybe you missed it, but it has been big news in the Boston area: classes were secretly photographed in spring 2014 as part of a Harvard University research project about classroom attendance. About 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls were … Continue reading
Researching in a Social World 