This is the draft version of the presentation for DBSocial 2012.

1. Distance Matters: An Exploratory Analysis of the
Linguistic Features of Flickr Photo Tag Metadata
in Relation to Impression Management
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed & Shion Guha
Department of Information Science,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

2. Data From The Society: Social Data
Social Influence
Social Contagions
Group Formations
Collaboration Patterns
Self-Expressions
Impression Management
etc.

3. Socializing Databases
SELECT persons FROM societyWHERE persons
are “emotional”
SELECT emotions FROM society WHERE
communities are “vulnerable to emotional
cascades”
Is
Social Data
hiding behind the
Data from the Society?

4. An image hosting and video hosting
website, web services suite, and
online community
that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by
Yahoo!
in 2005. [Wikipedia, May 19, 2011]
Yahoo reported in June 2011 that Flickr had a total of 51 million registered me

5. Tags

6. Why Do People Tag Photos ?
Helping Search
Categorization
Self Identity
and ...

7. Impression Management
Goal-directed conscious or
unconscious process in which people
attempt to influence the perceptions
of other people about a person,
object or event.
They do so by regulating and
controlling information in social
interactions.

8. Dramaturgy Theory By Erving Goffman
Dramaturgy is a sociological
perspective starting from
symbolic interactionism, and
commonly used in microsociological
accounts of social interaction in
everyday life.
Human actions are dependent upon
time, place, and audience.
The goal of this presentation of self
is acceptance from the audience
through carefully conducted
performance.

9. FrontStage Vs BackStage

10. Front Stage

11. Back Stage
Smart
Gorgeous
Fun Loving
Wise
Knowledgeable
Funny
Philanthropic
etc.

12. Invisible Audience: Who?
We analyzed Flickr
Tags to investigate
this.
We used LIWC
(Linguistic Inquiry and Word
to analyze the
Counts)
linguistic features of
these tags

13. Informational Words
The words which
contains information or
facts. Emotional tags of a
photo contain the facts
about the contents of
the photo.
Example: Eiffel Tower,
Grand Canyon, Taz
Mahal, 500 feet, etc.

14. Emotional Words
The words, which
contain emotions
Example: Happy,
Enjoy, Sad, Boring,
Disgusting, Hate,
Love, WoW, etc.

15. Relative Feature
This is LIWC class
of words that
contains all words
expressing space,
time, etc.
Example: Day, Place,
Year, Faster, Slower,
etc.

16. Affect Feature
LIWC class of words
which contain
emotion.
Example: Joy, Sad,
Love, Hate, etc.

17. Emotion and Distance
Is physical distance
has any effect on
psychological
distance ?

18. Tagging An “away” Photo
User’s Home Location: San
Diego, CA, USA.
Photo taken at: Paris, France
Distance: 5698 miles
Tags: “Paris”, “France”,
“Europe”, “TourEiffel”, “Eiffel
Tower”, ‘Travel 2009”.

19. Tagging a “Local” Photo
User’s Home Place: Paris, France
Photo taken at: Paris, France
Tags: “night”, “city”, “lights”, “at”,
“winter”, “event”, “street”, “trade”,
“leisure”, “iPhone”, “Eiffel”,
“entertainment”, “iphonography”,
etc.

20. Hypothesis 1
Distance will be negatively correlated with the
amount of “affect” contained in the photo tags.
Example: People are less expected to say
“bored”, “happy”, etc. when they are on a travel
to a place far away from their place.
People generally post more information when
they are traveling away from their place.

21. Hypothesis 2
Distance will be negatively correlated with the
amount of “affect” contained in the photo tags.
Example: People are less expected to say “day”,
“night”, “car”, etc. when they are on a travel to a
place far away from their place.
Did you notice people almost always upload the
photo of their cars, when the cars are around
their place?

22. Hypothesis 3
Distance will be positively correlated
with the interaction effect between
tags and relativity contained in photo
tags.
Example: People talk about “A
Beautiful House”, “A Horrible
Restaurant”, when they are far away
from their place.

23. Research Model

24. Photo Distance

25. Experiment
48 thousand
geotagged Flickr
photos
Taken in 2011
2 thousand photos
per month

26. What We Got
distance = 3718.7147 - 18.3245 * affect - 8.4009 *
relativity + 0.8276 * affect * relative + e
p < 0.01

27. Discussion
Most of the time, the invisible audience is
consisted of the people living around the user.
When they share something around them, they
share less information and more emotion.
When they share a photo taken far away from
their places, they try to introduce their audience
to the new things they see.

28. Social Recommendations
Get Information
from someone who
lives far away from
the place.
Get quality, emotion,
etc. from someone
who lives around
that place.

29. Influence
How do influential
people manage their
impression in the
society?
How does leadership
grow?

30. Predict Social Contagions
How do the
revolutions form?
How does a new
fashion spread out?

31. Thank You !