Editor's NoteScroll down to see a full ranking of all of New York's neighborhoods by perceived class and perceived safety. In 1921, a young Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach wrote a book called Psychodiagnostik containing 10 inkblot images he used to gauge mental patients' emotional processes. Based on how the patients interpreted random visual cues, administrators of the test believed they were granted windows into patients' psyches. In 2013, MIT researchers are using a similar approach to learn about cities, but with something much more sophisticated than inkblots. In 2010, César A. Hidalgo, a professor and director of the Macro Connections Research Group at MIT's Media Lab, started building a web tool to collect a multi–dimensional range of information about people's feelings toward certain city neighborhoods. Users compared one Google Street View image against another, answering questions like, "Which place looks more boring?" or "Which place looks wealthier?" The team sourced images from four cities––Boston and New York in the United States, and Linz and Salzburg in Austria––then quantified the results in a new paper published in the journal PLoS One last month. Overall, researchers identified more clusters of strongly positive and negative views about neighborhoods in the American cities––showing that "emotional inequality" of neighborhoods was uniquely higher in Boston and New York.Read Full Story Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2013-08-15 00:00:00 UTC ]