Pinterest Project Proposal

Working Title:
You Are What You Pin: Analyzing People Identities Based on Pinterest Pins

Working Thesis:
As people become involved with Pinterest, they not only showcase their interests but also show their identities through their likes, pins, and repins on Pinterest.

Preliminary Exploration:
For my preliminary exploration, I have been gathering data via Google Alerts--not that much comes up regarding Pinterest and identity, but I have found some good articles on social media in general and identity, which I think have pointed me in the right direction.

My previous blog posts have also looked at Moby Dick and Pinterest and a couple of curation posts here and here. What got me interested in this topic in the first place was reading Girl Wide Web 2.0, especially the chapters that dealt with identity and social media.

Relevance:
I think that this is topic is relevant because as we are spending more time with social media, we are needing to adjust and find ways to best represent ourselves online. There are different ways that people can represent themselves online, such as personally or professionally. From a Pinterest account, not only can people show their likes and interests but they also can show what is going on with their lives at the current time, such as a decorating for a new house or planning a party.

Format:
For the format of this project, I've decided to do a survey (click right here if you would like to take it) about Pinterest and identity to see if I could find a correlation between the two. I will then write a paper describing my background research and my findings and conclusions from the survey.

Outlet:
As stated from my last blog post, I was interested in the CATaC Conference because its theme is the closest to what I want to present. The papers can be in a short (3-5 pages) or long (10-15 pages) format. Since I plan on including the stats of my survey, the paper will be in the longer length. The paper is due on February 14.

Curation:
My curation includes gathering data from the survey and pinning images on Pinterest that correspond with the personality traits I used in the survey. The pinboards are as follows: extroverted, introverted, sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking, prospecting, and judging--the pins are typical of those personality traits, and I tried to get as wide of a variety as possible.

Social Proof:
I've gotten lots of people to respond to my survey so far, and I've had a couple of shares for my survey on Google+ and Facebook. I've also shared the survey to communities on Google+ (the Pinterest and Digital Identities communities to be exact), and I am looking forward to sharing my conclusions with these groups after I finish this project.

Next Steps:
The next steps include to finish gathering data from the survey, compile it all, and see if there really is a strong correlation between personality traits and pins on Pinterest. Since I don't know exactly what they will entail, I want to gather more secondary sources about analyzing identity from personality traits so I can see if the results from my survey might actually mean anything. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

That's it for now. I would appreciate any feedback and will offer up my feedback for your proposals as well.