Dataset scope
The portal reports annual commuting-zone aggregates derived from U.S. high school senior portraits between 1930 and 2010. These measures are designed to capture local cultural change and stylistic divergence over time.
Data Repository for Image(s)
Commuting-Zone Measures of Style, Norms, and Cultural Change
This page provides commuting-zone-year indicators constructed for our research project on Image(s), conducted at UZH from 2022–2026 by Hans-Joachim Voth and David Yanagizawa-Drott. We use more than 55 million U.S. high school yearbook portraits to study cultural change, the diffusion of new styles, convergence in male and female appearance, and spatial polarization in social norms from 1930 to 2010.
About This Dataset
The data below summarize annual measures of style and norm deviation at the commuting-zone level. Use the selector panel to preview a series or download a filtered CSV for a specific commuting zone and period.
Style Novelty
Style Novelty captures the prevalence of style combinations that were observed among fewer than 1 percent of students up to and including a given year. It is intended to measure the arrival of genuinely new stylistic combinations.
Horizontal Norm Deviation
Horizontal Norm Deviation measures how far a student's style differs from that of contemporaneous peers within the same high school. Higher values indicate weaker conformity to the local peer environment.
Vertical Norm Deviation
Vertical Norm Deviation measures how different a cohort's style is from that of students in the same high school twenty years earlier. Higher values indicate greater intergenerational stylistic change.
Gender-specific variants are reported with the suffixes _m for men and
_f for women. The raw index is labeled Norm Deviation Raw Index.
Download Data
Select a commuting zone, a time window, and a measure to preview the series or download the corresponding subset as CSV.
Plot
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Preview
The first matching rows appear here before download.