ted carter

As someone who spent his graduate school career studying item response theory and the way people use multiple-choice scales, I can say that there are many, many ways to interpret the photo.net ratings we get. As for the scale, there are two flaws that come to mind immediately:

 

The terms "aesthetics" and "originality" are not mutually exclusive terms, and thus people often just give the same rating for each. I think there are only two instances where you can justify a big difference between the two; when it is obvious that the artist has put a lot of creativity into a lousy shot, or when the artist has taken a lovely shot that hundreds of folks have taken before. Since each of these is an extreme instance, I think it makes sense that you don't often see the scores for A and O very far apart. I myself find it difficult to judge a photo as original if I don't also see it as aesthetically pleasing, and vice-versa.

 

Second, research shows that you cannot expect scores on a numerical scale to be distributed evenly if you label all of the points in between. In other words, there is not the same "psychological" difference between "Very Bad" and "Bad" as there is between "Bad" and "Below Average". Most experts in this field recommend that you only label the end points, and leave the numbers in-between as numbers alone.

 

(Amateur indeed...)

Al,

 

As a statistician, I can tell you that with this type of rating scale, it is probably better to look at the distribution of scores. I will attach my latest graph, which I ran in Excel, to show the distribution of ratings for both aesthetics and originality. Let me know what you think!

Synonyms always help me. For me, "aesthetics" is synonymous with "beauty," and "originality" with "creativity." In other words, for me originality deals with the artist and his/her craft, and aesthetics deals with the subject matter itself. Make sense?