In his talk, Mapping the Digital Facets of Place, Derek Watkins presents a case study of geoweb representations in English and Spanish along the U.S.-Mexico border and how these digital constructions create and influence perception of places along the border.
SheepCamp 2012, Derek Watkins from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.
Derek's website/blog: http://blog.dwtkns.com/
On Twitter: @dwtkns
Showing posts with label Flickr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flickr. Show all posts
April 06, 2011
Kind of Creepy
You have to love a software program called Creepy. It is even better if its purpose is to highlight the ability to aggregate someone's location information based on their tweets and Flickr photo uploads.The goal of its creator Yiannis Kakavas is to both raise people's awareness about how much information they are giving out and provide researchers with a nifty tool.
We downloaded the application and played around with a bit but the results were a bit disappointing. Our twitter ID, Floating_sheep had no geographic references (which incidentally was a conscious choice on Taylor's part) and the other twitter IDs we tried didn't have much geo-information either. We never ran it on Flickr data but suspect that the geo-information would be a lot richer.
In any case, give it a try and don't forget to invest in tin foil futures.
October 15, 2010
More Flickr Mapping
Building on our visualisation of 34 million geotagged Flickr images, we have decided to map the data normalised by population and area. In doing so, some quite interesting patterns are evident.
Flickr Images per 100 square km
Predictably, we see some of the same core-periphery patterns that are observable in other types of user-generated content (e.g. Wikipedia). More surprising is the fact that unlike the geography of Wikipedia content, there are a significant number of low-income countries with relative large amounts of content (i.e. images) per every 100,000 people and 100km. Cambodia, Oman, Namibia, South Africa, Nepal and a host of other countries all score highly using these normalised measures.
I would hypothesise that two factors are at play here. First, there are lower barriers to entry on Flickr versus Wikipedia. In other words, despite the openness of Wikipedia, it is still easier to upload geotagged photos to Flickr than to create a new article and defend it's existence against nominations for deletion and overzealous editors. Moreover, the binary developed vs. developing country division has always masked the range of differences between and within countries, e.g., an interesting comparison between Oman and Yemen.
Second, it is also probable that much of the content in low-income countries is created by visitors and tourists. For instance, a significant number of photos geotagged to Cambodia are likely tourist shots of the Angkor Wat temple complex rather than locally created scenes of more everyday events.
Whatever the reasons are, more research is clearly needed on the topic to uncover what the specific biases in authorship are. Furthermore, irrespective of the specific reasons, it remains that these maps continue to show significant unevenness in user-generated content around the world.
For further reading see:
Graham, M. 2010. Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101(4): 422-436.
Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum 38(6): 1322-1343
Flickr Images per 100,000 people
Flickr Images per 100 square km
Predictably, we see some of the same core-periphery patterns that are observable in other types of user-generated content (e.g. Wikipedia). More surprising is the fact that unlike the geography of Wikipedia content, there are a significant number of low-income countries with relative large amounts of content (i.e. images) per every 100,000 people and 100km. Cambodia, Oman, Namibia, South Africa, Nepal and a host of other countries all score highly using these normalised measures.
I would hypothesise that two factors are at play here. First, there are lower barriers to entry on Flickr versus Wikipedia. In other words, despite the openness of Wikipedia, it is still easier to upload geotagged photos to Flickr than to create a new article and defend it's existence against nominations for deletion and overzealous editors. Moreover, the binary developed vs. developing country division has always masked the range of differences between and within countries, e.g., an interesting comparison between Oman and Yemen.
Second, it is also probable that much of the content in low-income countries is created by visitors and tourists. For instance, a significant number of photos geotagged to Cambodia are likely tourist shots of the Angkor Wat temple complex rather than locally created scenes of more everyday events.
Whatever the reasons are, more research is clearly needed on the topic to uncover what the specific biases in authorship are. Furthermore, irrespective of the specific reasons, it remains that these maps continue to show significant unevenness in user-generated content around the world.
For further reading see:
Graham, M. 2010. Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101(4): 422-436.
Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum 38(6): 1322-1343
July 26, 2010
Mapping Flickr
Today's map is a visualisation of all 34 million geotagged Flickr images. The data were kindly collected by Eric Fischer and then aggregated to the country-level (an operation that took our computer about three weeks to process!).
You can see that user-generated images in Flickr display similar geographies to other types of user-generated content (e.g. Wikipedia). In the next few weeks, we'll upload some variations of this map. These results aren't necessarily surprising, but do just reinforce findings that subjects of user-generated content are highly concentrated in only a few parts of the world.
You can see that user-generated images in Flickr display similar geographies to other types of user-generated content (e.g. Wikipedia). In the next few weeks, we'll upload some variations of this map. These results aren't necessarily surprising, but do just reinforce findings that subjects of user-generated content are highly concentrated in only a few parts of the world.
June 14, 2010
Mapping Geographies of Interest: Tourists vs. Locals
Eric Fischer has struck again and expanded on the Geotaggers' World Atlas. He has now released a series of map that use Flickr data to distinguish between photos taken by locals and photos taken by tourists. The results are fascinating, and you get to see very different areas of interest between locals and tourists. In the three maps below (London, San Francisco and New York, red pictures are taken by tourists and blue pictures are taken by locals. Head over to his site for the full collection of 81 maps.
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