Cluster analysis in the classroom

I am a guest at the New School's Journalism + Design program this semester.

The students conducted interviews about the question of what makes someone famous. Their interviewees were asked to name five famous people. We had images of these people up on the wall.

Then, we put the pictures into clusters. We tried two different ways of doing it.

At the end, we compared our result to what a computer program generated.

Here are some interesting applications of cluster analysis in the press: FiveThirtyEight made clusters of the intra-season performance profiles of NFL quarterbacks; Pew Research Center made clusters of political values and attitudes.