Rachel Feltman, Quartz
March 10, 2014
Love them or hate them, GIFs rule the web—and a pair of graduate students at the MIT Media Lab want to turn them into a language. Travis Rich and Kevin Hu started a site that uses human brain power to quantify the emotional content of animated GIFs (like the two below), as a side project. But their site, GIFGIF, is no joke.
“We were talking about GIFs one day,” Hu told Quartz, “and we realized that they’re becoming more and more serious of a medium. They’re more popular, they’re used for more things.” Buzzfeed, for example, recently used GIFs to explain what was going on in Ukraine—reaching an audience that otherwise might have ignored the news. “And we realized,” Hu said, “that we could quantify this usage.” […continued]
0
0
0
0
Comments