@phdthesis{Thommes2020Aesth-52547,
  year={2020},
  title={The Aesthetic Appeal of Photographs : Leveraging Instagram Data in Empirical Aesthetics},
  author={Thömmes, Katja},
  address={Konstanz},
  school={Universität Konstanz}
}

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    <dcterms:abstract xml:lang="eng">Visual aesthetic experiences are omnipresent in our everyday life: from the joy that arises from looking at untouched natural landscapes or beautifully designed objects and artworks, to the conscious or unconscious aesthetic preferences that influence ordinary purchasing decisions for food or clothing, all the way to important life decisions like selecting a partner. It is thus no wonder that empirical aesthetics is a research field that scientists, artists, humanists, and marketers alike are interested in. The increasingly interdisciplinary field of empirical aesthetics offers manifold methods and a vast range of perspectives on aesthetic issues. This doctoral thesis examines the aesthetic appeal of photographs from the disciplinary viewpoint of psychology. In three consecutive research papers it addresses the fundamental issue of how to define an aesthetic measure for a suitable set of images in order to investigate aesthetic principles. This is done by leveraging data from a real-world source: the social media platform Instagram. The first research paper addresses the question whether and how Instagram Likes can be leveraged to investigate aesthetic principles. It provides insights from an explorative investigation of liking data and low-level image features in a confined set of about 700 photographs derived from five large Instagram accounts of architecture photographs. It is shown that Instagram Likes can serve as a proxy for the aesthetic appeal of images if important confounds are controlled for through careful data selection. Based on the promising results from this initial study, in research paper 2 the database is broadened to over 15,000 images from different genres (architecture, dancer portraits, and landscapes) and a comprehensive method is developed to compute an aesthetic score reflecting the aesthetic appeal of an image based on Instagram Likes. This method systematically reflects and addresses the need to control for influential confounds, above all the growing numbers of followers of an account over time. Finally, in the 3rd research paper 30,000 photographs from another genre, namely bird photography, are investigated, lending further proof for the broad applicability of the method from research paper 2. The investigation of several form, content, and context variables that were hypothesized to affect the aesthetic appeal of such photos underlines the potential of leveraging Instagram data in empirical aesthetics. This doctoral thesis proposes a new approach to tap a valuable source of data for empirical aesthetics and develops a measure for the aesthetic appeal of photographs. Several previously studied aesthetic principles were replicated and generalized using Instagram data, providing empirical evidence for both universal and domain-specific aesthetic effects. The methodological contributions of this thesis provide a sound basis for the use of real-life data from Instagram to investigate aesthetic principles with good ecological validity in mind.</dcterms:abstract>
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    <dc:contributor>Thömmes, Katja</dc:contributor>
    <dc:creator>Thömmes, Katja</dc:creator>
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    <dcterms:issued>2020</dcterms:issued>
    <dcterms:title>The Aesthetic Appeal of Photographs : Leveraging Instagram Data in Empirical Aesthetics</dcterms:title>
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