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    Smartspace Journal Archive
    « Introducing Location Services to the Masses | Main | NFC Going Mainstream? »
    Thursday
    07Dec2006

    Visualizing the Visitor's Eye

    london tags.jpgTwo posts recently on sites I frequent pointed to two different means of visualizing the parts of cities most photographed by visitors, both using Flickr users as proxies for all tourists in effect. The first , done by Yahoo! Research Berkeley, simply uses the tag cloud approach to map the most frequent location tags used alongside images of London, creating a tag map of London as seen from photographers' point of interest. As the Yahoo! team theorized: "Individual pictures taken at a specific location act as “votes” in favor of that location’s interest..."

    The second post, from Fabien Girardin, analyzed Flickr tag data to produce "heat map" visualizations of similar data for other cities, primarily Barcelona. The same outcome can be seen -- photographers tend to take (or at least post) images taken around the most known landmarks.

    The reasons are probably manifold. People go to see sites they are most familiar with, and want to share evidence of their visit (or that they are "cultured" or have ticked the great world icons off their life's list of tasks). They also go where the services and entertainment are, which are often clustered around these locations. Likewise, they are often visually more stimulating, due to the high traffic levels, attendant advertising, sight and sounds in general.

    bcn_flickr_heatmap3-tm.jpg

    What can cities do with this information?  Potentially site commercial and public service infrastructure in these locations, or utilize tourist eyeballs more effectively by moving visual communication to these locations. These techniques also provide an inight similar to that found in Emotion Maps, which indicate emotional response of the visitor to the landscape -- a psychogeographic tool to better understand how individuals interact with geography intellectually as well as physically.

    Reader Comments (3)

    Interesting! I like this urban planning / cityscapes take on the "mining activity" idea.

    Stay tuned for an extenstion of the Tag Maps, coming from us pretty soon. By the way, the tags for are maps are not selected simply by frequency - it's a bit trickier than that - but close enough.
    December 9, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterMor
    Thanks for the compliment. I was amiss in my use of the word "simply" because it's never simple. I assumed you have a pretty interesting system for selecting the tags, not frequency alone.

    Let me know when the next extension comes along.
    December 11, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterScott
    My "heat map" visualizations of Flickr geotagged photos of Barcelona is actually located at:
    http://www.girardin.org/fabien/blog/2006/12/01/heat-map-of-barcelona-geotagged-images/
    December 18, 2006 | Unregistered Commenterfabien

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