Luminous Cities: offering an alternative way of geotag

Image1. The webpage of Luminous Cities_Manhattan

Studying human behaviours and communication in time and space has been regarded as the important factor of modern urban planning. In this digital era, collecting online data and analysing the data provide an opportunity to understand the intention and the process of the behaviours and the communication which had not been revealed.

Geotag, which is attached on Social Network Service (SNS), is concerned as one of connecting link between the internet and urban. Mainly, there are two types of geotag. One is user-generated geotag that SNS users identify the places on their contents. The other is automatically generated with spatial coordination by the services. It represents the political, social and economic characteristics of the places as well as the physical location of the user or the data produced.

There are many good examples of mapping the geotag data of SNS. Eric Fischer’s well known mapping images reveal not only the density of the geotag data but also social aspects in cities such as the invisible dimensions of tourism in New York (Image 2). Twitter Languages in London by James Cheshire and Ed Manley shows the popularity of languages depends on different locations in London ((Image 3).

Image2. The mapping geotag data of locals and tourists by Eric Fischer 

Image3. Twitter Languages in London, James Cheshire and Ed Manley

Luminous Cities is the project to demonstrate the interactive map of Flickr geotag data supported by CASA at UCL and CSAP at the University of Leeds. It has developed by Gavin Baily and Sarah Bagshaw. The project does not remain the displaying density and distribution of the geotag, but offers in-detail contents of the geotag such as user, tag, time of the day and timeline over 50 cities in the world. With the multiple contents, Luminous Cities could be a platform to check out the geotag data of Flickr based on personal interest, and to view their cities from a different side. When it comes to Networking City, who is interested in protest and demonstration in the city, it would be a helpful tool to examine the relationship between protests or occupy tags of Flickr in London and actual events of them. Also, some interesting results may be emerging when we compare two data sets: Flickr and Twitter.

Image4. Berlin user geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image5. London occupy geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image6. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom out, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image7. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom in, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

You can find more things from following links.

Flickr was shown as the highest growing application in 2013 by Mashable

http://mashable.com/2013/10/21/fastest-growing-apps/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

Mapping the world with Flickr and Twitter by Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2011/jul/13/flickr-twitter-maps

Infographic Of The Day: Using Twitter And Flickr Geotags To Map The World

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664462/infographic-of-the-day-using-twitter-and-flickr-geotags-to-map-the-world