Eric Fisher displays Twitter and Flicker geotags on a map as art, but is there any knowledge to be inferred from the resulting images? The Washington Post’s weekend magazine has a feature article on Fisher’s art/analyses that poses just that question. Take the image at left, for example: Fisher posts the geotags of pictures posted to Flicker (red), Twitter messages (blue), and both pictures and tweets (white) on a map of Washington, DC, resulting in a map that shows how activities and their intensities vary with location.
I think it is clear the maps are more than just pretty pictures, since there are patterns that emerge. For the Washington, DC, area, we seem to take lots of pictures in scenic spots like Great Falls (the red y-shaped area at upper left) but like to say something when at Tyson’s Corner (the blue amoeba at left). It is easy to see the Mall (red rectangle of intense picture-taking just south of the city’s center) and to tell where each monument is – especially the Lincoln Memorial.
Similar maps are at Fisher’s photostream on Flickr.
-ddw
[...] visualization can be beautiful, humorous, and sometimes a waste of ink, but it is an important tool for understanding and [...]