Shiry Ginosar - Yearbook Averages
Data mining has changed the way we think about information. Machine-learning algorithms now routinely chomp their way through data sets of Twitter conversations, travel patterns, phone calls, and health records, to name just a few. But there is another historical data set that has been largely ignored by the data-mining community—photographs. This presents a more complex challenge.
These guys start with a relatively simple database—American high-school yearbook photographs dating back to 1905. These yearbook photos have been digitized on large scale by local libraries all over the U.S. and show full frontal photos of individuals in a standard pose.
Ginosar and co downloaded over 150,000 of these portraits. After removing those that were not full frontal portraits, they were left with some 37,000 images from more than 800 yearbooks from 26 U.S. states.
They then grouped the portraits by decade and superimposed the images to produce an “average” face for each period. This process revealed other “average” features for each period such as hairstyle, clothing, style of glasses, and even average facial expressions. The image above shows these averages for each decade for men and women.
snowghoul
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
janainaart
gummygunk
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
titsay
