In today’s world photos are becoming a dominant means of communicating. There are many online photo sharing sites like Instagram that provide people with the ability to turn photos into a social medium. Because of its popularity many people are trying to discover the mechanisms by which users communicate around these photos and how the engage with them. In the article “Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram” the authors try to answer two main questions dealing with this. These questions are “do photos with faces differ in online engagement compared to photos without them?” and “if so, how do characteristics of the image subject, such as gender and age, affect engagement?”(Bakhshi, Shamma and Gilbert 1) …show more content…
They used a quantitative approach to investigate the relationship between online engagement and faces (3). The way they determined if there was engagement with the photos was by viewing the likes and comments of the photo. The number of likes, signals for the extent to which the content is interesting to users and the number of comments quantifies the level of discussion on the social network (3). What they then did was gather a random sample of popular photos from Instagram and then used snowball sampling to collect the users and their followers to gather a random set of their photos (4). After collecting all the photos they determined whether there was at least one human face in it. Once they determined the presences of faces, they then considered variables such as age and gender. After analyzing the photos, they used a negative binomial regression to model the number of likes and comments each photo had received to determine the overall engagement