Photocracy

April 21, 2009 3:47 PM

Photocracy
Photocracy is a site asking you to decide which photo is more representative of the US, China and Japan. It's part of a study to find differences in perceptions between different countries.
posted by null terminated (4 comments total)

I tried this, and it is very interesting.

But it never asked me what country I was from. You can't assume that people on the English website are American.
posted by jb at 9:13 PM on April 21, 2009

There are 60 + 30 + 20 + 4 + 4 .... oh, probably more .... million non-Americans in the world who live in a country with English as an official language. Including, you know, the English.
posted by jb at 9:16 PM on April 21, 2009

Oh - and I'm obviously anglophone-centric, but there is the same problem with your Chinese site. I don't know of any major Japanese communities outside of Japan - perhaps there are - but there are millions of Chinese reading and speaking people who do not live in the PRC. You probably would like to differentiate between the votes of people in the PRC as opposed to Taiwan or Singapore when describing the PRC, for instance. You should have people declare where they are from, before they start voting. And perhaps whether they have visited and lived in any of the three countries - Canadians who have lived in the US might vote differently both from Americans and from Canadians who have not lived in the US.
posted by jb at 9:23 PM on April 21, 2009

jb: You're right about the difficulties in assuming the country visitors are from. This specific site uses a more general pairwise comparison api and was used as part of an undergraduate sociological study (which is now complete). Traffic was generated by targeting sites with a large American or Chinese or Japanese readership with keywords. This isn't perfect, but should provide reasonable results.
posted by null terminated at 7:46 AM on April 22, 2009