Visualizing the Visitor's Eye

Two 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.

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.

Update on December 11, 2006 by Scott Smith

As if to emphasize the point made here about taking advantage of where tourists' eyeballs and cameras are focused, the New York Times today writes about how advertisers have recognized this phenomenon and are trying to exploit it in Times Square, due to it's heavy volume of tourist traffic and eye-candy visual environment.

Comments

[Mor]

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.

[Scott]

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.

[fabien]

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/