Human annotators are great at providing basic information about images. We were wondering if we could find something interesting about magazine covers. Stumbling upon 2800 Sports Illustrated cover images going back to 1954, we sent them to Mechanical Turk, asking people to identify the race and gender of the person featured (if any), and what sport was depicted. There are lots of interesting things in this data; this post will touch on just a few we’ve had time to whip together some graphs for.
Here is a historical graph of the frequency of how often people of different races appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The story is simple and striking:
Next: which sports get featured on the cover? Here’s a chart for several sports over that same time.
It might be possible to find links between the careers of famous athletes and rises and falls their sports’ popularity; for example, boxing peaks in the 70’s (Muhammad Ali?), basketball peaks in the 90’s (Michael Jordan?) and golf bounces back in the 90’s after a long decline (Tiger Woods?).
Many other sports appear in the data, too; for this chart, we made sure to pick the three most common, and a few other particularly interesting ones. Percentages don’t add up to 100% because we didn’t plot all the other sports, including things like horse racing which used to be much more popular. If you’re really curious, here’s the full chart of all sports we asked about, including many of the smaller ones.
Kris
Love the charts. Thanks for sharing them!
Marti
Very fun charts. Did you use the Flex charting tool for these?
Glad to see the company is going so well.
brendano
Actually, it’s all R. I’m addicted.
Scott Elliott
So they have never had a Hockey cover? Hockey is more popular then Soccer, at least in North America, isn’t it?
Joan Miller
“Less white people” is poor grammar; correctly phrased should be “Fewer white people.”
Miles Newbold Clark
Awesome chart… though perhaps worth pointing out that over the last 10 years SI has occasinally come out with “regional” covers… a Chicagoan is thus more likely to see a picture of Michael Jordan, and a Salt Lake Citizen was to see a shot of John Stockton. Is this regionalization reflected in the data?
The one exception to this regionalization is the swimsuit issue; a graph which showed the declining percentage of models who are actually wearing all (or part) of their swimsuits in a given issue would be infallible.
paul
doesnt matter what race you are as long as your good at sports and thats all that will matter.
paul
oh ya love the charts what kriste says
DON ELSTON
Black people are smarter than we are. They get paid millions for playing a game. We sit in the stands, 90% white, paying exarbitant prices and freeze our fannies!!!!
A. Whitman
This data serves as evidence of the genocide being committed against whites.
Go ahead delete my comments again but it does not change the facts, you can erase the truth, but the facts still stand!
lukas
A. Whitman, your comments were deleted not because of your racism but because you had spam advertising some peer-to-peer client that was completely irrelevant to the post.
William Robert
I like this chart.This chart is represent ratio of different -2 games as like Base ball,Basketball,Boxing and Golf,Soccer and foot ball.
Glad to see this chart.
serie a goals
Hey, I just wanted to say what a fantastic website. I certainly enjoyed it and found it interesting reading. Awaiting your next post!
Al Watson
I see that all you cowardly pipsqueaks are too intimidated to even mention the truth.
The blackening of imagery is pervasive. Africans are 10% of the population. Whites are 80%. Yet picture content everywhere is 50-70% black. Why? Why are there no latinos or asians represented? Why do you except the contradictory images of Africans? i.e. downtrodden but real leaders, victims but intimidating, low class but preferred by white women…all TV and movie crap shows them as bosses and whites are weak nothings. (Are you getting afraid? Is this racism? You poor pathetic half humans. You have lost your freedom already.)
Either psychologically, all of you are so pro-African that you are obsessed with seeing and thinking about them constantly. You elected a black supremacist, Marxist Muslim prez. You are always groveling to blacks in media and public. You can’t wait to waste my tax dollars taking care of Haiti and Africa. You are the epitomy of weakness.
OR maybe its something more diabolical. Maybe geek genius media consumer manipulation experts are flooding you with african imagery so that you will be so fixated that you lose your humanity and become ashamed of your race and willingly give up your right to think, have an opinion or object to black supremacy?
Which is it suckers?