The Most Sophisticated Flickr Maps We've Ever Seen

We've come across a lot of nice Flickr visualizations of global cities but never anything quite this comprehensive across space and time: Meet Luminous Cities, a creation of the London-based mapping and digital arts firm TraceMedia, built with support from the Centre for Spatial Analysis & Policy at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. The project is trying to "uncover the archeology of data traces left by social media" in cities across the globe.

The Flickr tool in particular contains an enormous wealth of data – photos themselves, their location, the topical tags associated with them – that can be spliced in infinite ways and visualized across time to illustrate individual events like a natural disaster, or specific geographies like the one associated with Occupy protesters. TraceMedia initially launched the project last year in London, but recently updated it to include more than 50 global cities, some with Flickr data going back as far as 2004. You can view any city during a specific window of time, or in an animation over time, while simultaneously plotting multiple tags (like in the London map shown above).