eScience Center project goes to Lowlands Festival
Updated on 26 August 2024:
The PORN-TYPES ‘pornfessions’ interactive research at the Lowlands Festival went better than expected. Olga reported that there was a ‘continuous line throughout the entire festival’ with a participant list of approximately 210 people, the maximum they could study. The day was long but the atmosphere was vibrant and curious. Participants most enjoyed speaking to the ‘porn-priest’ who communicated with them via a microphone and noise-cancelling headphones from inside a booth where both party’s identities were concealed. The results from the experiment will be processed and analysed within the coming months. Keep an eye out for more updates to this story.
It’s not often that an eScience Center project is invited to one of the most popular music festivals in the Netherlands. Then again, it’s not often that the eScience Center contributes software to a project about pornography.
The PORN-TYPES project uses an interdisciplinary multi-methods approach to understand why people from diverse social backgrounds enjoy watching stereotypes in online pornography. Driven by the curiosity surrounding the social side of sex, associate professor Samira van Bohemen at Erasmus University Rotterdam explores the deeply rooted gender inequality and colonial legacy that exists behind stereotypes in pornography. As she likes to explain, ‘These stereotypes do not appear out of thin air, nor are they the product of pornography as a specific genre. They are reflections of larger cultural ideas that live within society and oftentimes have long histories.’
The objective of PORN-TYPES is to look at stereotypes in online pornography, explore how they change over time and explain why these changes occur. The project uses a variety of methods to collect, process and analyse data. One of these methods is collecting large quantities of data from pornographic websites in order to find correlations between metadata, like video titles, to see if we can identify stereotypes and their specific attributes. Generating conclusions from this large amount of data requires specialized software and expertise from a Research Software Engineer (RSE).
This is where our work at the Netherlands eScience Center comes in. Based on metadata (video titles, tags, number of views, etc.) from Pornhub and using word embeddings (a technique from natural language processing), RSE Olga Lyashevska will be able to decipher which videos belong to which stereotype category. ‘The exciting part is that software will allow us to attach stereotype(s) to each video based on their tags and titles without even watching the videos,’ Olga explains.
‘By connecting this to the other data available, like the number of views per video, we get a much better understanding of what these stereotypes look like and how they are distributed over the pornographic landscape’, says Van Bohemen. ‘The team has already found that videos that are more stereotypical are more popular than videos that are less stereotypical.’
The socio-cultural component of the project – understanding where these deeply rooted stereotypes come from – will be examined more closely at the Lowlands Festival. At the Festival, attendees will have the opportunity to take part in two different activities. First, they will be presented with titles of videos. Each participant will have to sort the titles according to their preference and will briefly be interviewed on the motives behind these preferences. The second activity presents participants with real pornographic videos and measures their physiological response before, during and after the video is shown. This includes their heart rate and eye movement on top of their subjective experience of arousal, which they will also be asked to indicate.
If you would like to learn more about the project and software, please visit the Research Software Directory.
If you are attending the Lowlands Festival and would like to participate in the activities mentioned above, please read more here.
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a Fellowship Programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.