Creating an Instrument for the Manual Coding and Exploration of Group Selfies on the Social Web

Abstract

A subgroup of the images shared as part of the “selfie” phenomenon is group selfies (aka “groupies” and “we-fies” or “us-ies”) or self-portraits of groups (three or more individuals of focal interest) that are shared on social media. These images have informational value that has thus far been only thinly explored. In this work, an instrument—Categorization and Exploration of Group Selfies Instrument (CEGSI), pronounced “segsy”—was constructed of three parts: (1) Group Selfie Content and Context, (2) Group Selfie Image Creation, and (3) Group Selfie Messaging. It was tested against two image sets: group selfies and dronies, which were scraped from Google Images. This chapter describes the work, the analytical findings, and the resulting instrument for the manual coding of group selfies, and other insights.