An experiment about how we view history
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
I think the experiment would be better if it accepted a range instead of a single date.
I think a bigger problem is where to initially put the selection knob. The knob on the picture of the two 'hippy' women was placed around '64 (if I remember correctly), confirming the bias in my brain "60s == hippy". I suspect most people link the selection knob mentally as a sort of 'caption' of the photo, even though they know consciously it's the selection tool.People are also probably slightly less likely to move a slider further than closer.
The hardest part for me was having no context of where the pictures were taken (although I should have guessed in the US). The picture of the farmers & the horse could have been taken today in many parts of Africa.
Even in a place that still farms like that with wagons that have wooden wheels, I would expect a baseball style cap instead.
I learned I don't really know much about clothing styles.
From the site:
>When you were dating the photos, you probably looked for context clues — what people were wearing, if there were any familiar buildings, and if you recognized any faces. You were probably also looking at color.
I would argue that the very nature of the site makes it more likely that most people were using context clues. I also wonder if color gives you more detail/clues and hence in most of the photos I was shown, the color guesses were closer to the actual year.
I would find the accuracy of the guesses (as opposed to the difference between color and B&W guesses) more informational, for a larger data set.
It's actually an interesting point that is directly related to the subject research. How can you get an accurate picture when things cannot be discussed freely … you simply can't.
I encourage everyone to diversify your channels for for discussion and knowledge, be it distributed forums or even things like using some of the browsers and/or plugins that allow for open discussion on top of what is permitted by the heavy handed types (to put it it extremely lightly) among us.
The Einstein photo, for example... I knew he died in the 1950s, but I wasn't sure when.... but the audience was mostly Black, so that pushed it forward for me into the 1960s... without those clues, I would have been more wildly guessing.
I tried really hard to ignore the monochrome/color aspect... it would be really nice to know how far off I was on each after the fact.
The uninteresting takeaway is that people note whether a photo is B&W/color and use that to help date the photo. Well, no kidding. We use a lot of contextual information to try to figure that out: not only B&W/color but also graininess, hair/clothing styles, architectural clues, etc. It should not be surprising that we do this. In fact, it would be surprising if we didn't do this.
The slightly more interesting takeaway is that we're bad at it, likely because most people don't have an accurate idea about when color photography became mainstream, and possibly also because some people fail to realize that sometimes B&W is an artistic choice, rather than a technical limitation.
As for what applications that might have ... well, I'm not sure. If it's extremely important (for, say, financial or political reasons) to accurately date a photo, my guess is that you'll bring an expert rather than a layman who knows to account for this. So really the only time I see the effect coming into play is when you have an armchair historian who doesn't know their own limitations.
In 2 out of the 5 cases; I picked the year far more accurate than the avg., but the visualization of the dots on the timeline implied that the avg. was far more accurate than my guess.
For example; when my guess was off by one year and the avg was off by 4 and 6 years, the dot for the avg was right next to the actual date line, while the dot representing my guess was almost twice the diameter of the dot away from the actual date line.
It gives quite the false impression and is also quite an interesting example of distortion of reality and people's perceptions, even if not intentional. I theorize that most people do not look detailed enough or do the simple math to confirm that the visual representation is accurate; thereby leaving them an impression of accuracy and inaccuracy, depending on the results.
What surprised me is the magnitude of the effect in photos that were clearly taken after the advent of widespread mainstream colour photography. I'd have guessed the difference between the colour and non-colour groups would shrink considerably since colour would be much more a reflection of artistic choice than technological or resource constraint.
Here are some pictures of people, behaviors, clothing and facilities that likely existed before you were born. Some of these things probably still exist in various locales.