My personal experience with Pinterest is rather limited, although I did use it once to plan my high school prom. I can see how cultivating pins could help create a virtual identity, similar to sites like Tumblr. However, I don't have enough of a background to really talk about my own identity related to Pinterest.
The Data Scraping API made it possible to consult both qualitative and quantitative data from Pinterest searches. I was surprised by how much you could learn about the website's perception of your digital identity just from a single search result.
The vertical video was trickier than I thought! When you said it was a challenge option for the DH project, I had laughed it off. But, I was wrong. Vertical videos are much harder to plan and require much more concentration when editing and filming to make sure your subject stays in the frame. However, playing it back on my phone was very rewarding and with Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and Quibi, the vertical format is definitely a big part of media going forward in the future.