The main goal of selfiecity is to help researchers answer these two questions by providing a set of data from selfies taken from different cities around the world:
- How can the history of photography help to better understand the selfies phenomenon?
- How can we theoretically approach social media images in general?
The audience for both of these goals is academic researchers who can use the data to analyze the selfie phenomenon.
Another goal of selfiecity, as proposed by Alise Tifentale of the City University of New York City, is to examine what selfies from a specific city can tell us about that city. Again, the audience for this goal is academic researchers who use the data to answer a research question.
These goals of taking an academic approach to a non-academic cultural phenomenon align with one of the goals of Digital Humanities, which is to analyze and interpret cultural data. Selfiecity is doing this by providing access to data from the study of the cultural phenomenon known as the selfie, which researchers can use to analyze, interpret, and ultimately draw conclusions about human culture.
