Culture
What Flickr Can Teach Us About the Way We Photograph Cities
Maps of data offer a precise understanding of the where we shoot different landmarks.
What do people photograph when they visit Fort Mason, an army base-turned-cultural center on the San Francisco waterfront?
Instead of heading down with a clipboard to do interviews, UC-Berkeley researcher Alexander Dunkel analyzed data from Flickr. Using geotags, which relay the exact location of the photographer, he was able to place over 125,000 photos on a map of the area [PDF], with expanding colored disks indicating the popularity of a certain viewpoints.