What I Think About Dollar Street

This is my response to the following questions my professor for one of my modules posed to us.

• What do you think about Dollar Street as a visual framework to understand how people live? (Give one strength and one weakness of the Dollar Street project).

• Suggest one application domain that such a visual framework (combining photographs with statistics) can be applied.

Strength

• The nature of using photos is that they don’t really require literacy or numeracy skills for people to understand what they mean. The Dollar Street visualisation is thus extremely useful in educating children (and adults) across many languages about the socio-economic statuses of people around the world without having to translate the data.

Weakness

• However, the nature of photos is also such that they are not easily understood by a computer algorithm/ statistical software. They usually require some initial human interpretation.

• Used on a small scale, like a class of students using it to understand income discrepancy, they can definitely gain some useful insights from the Dollar Street visualisation about their issue of interest. But if researchers want to make full use of the 30, 000 photos collected so far to gain insights that might inform policy actions, the Dollar Street visualisation will not be as useful for them (although the raw data still is) if they have a limited period of time.

Application

• A visual framework can be used to depict the social media profile of a country/ state/ city – using Instagram posts geo-tagged in the specific country/ state/ city. The framework can be categorised/ filtered by popularity of posts, theme of posts (eg, celebrations, outfits, day in the life, scenery), date posted, etc.