Locals and Tourists

July 26, 2013 8:49 PM

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in places that tourists don't visit. Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Map of photosets (scroll through photo thumbnails to discover new cities in the photoset

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can't be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven't taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken by locals.

posted by KokuRyu (10 comments total)

I hate to do this to a post about something I made, but it was already on MetaFilter a few years ago.

But there's also a new worldwide one from Twitter data (thanks to MapBox and Gnip).
posted by enf at 9:37 PM on July 26, 2013 [4 favorites]

With the Twitter map, whenever I zoom in the colours fade. Any way to fix that?
posted by KokuRyu at 9:50 PM on July 26, 2013

The map tiles were unfortunately statically generated from raw data that I no longer have access to, so I can't fix it. There are a lot of things I should have done a bit differently.
posted by enf at 9:52 PM on July 26, 2013

The Twitter map is pretty neat, and I love the way you can explore around the globe.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:58 PM on July 26, 2013

Trying to guess what cities these are by the shape of the datasets is a fun game.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:58 PM on July 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the reminder of this, and the chance to say how much I love it!
posted by freebird at 11:36 PM on July 26, 2013

I love the difference between the very nearly red Flickr map lower right and the much much bluer Twitter map in Bath, where I live. Especially noticeable is that no one actually tweets at the Baths or at the Royal Crescent, and the biggest cluster of non-locals tweeting is at the station, the (big box) cinema and the shopping centre. The actual people tweeting nearer the tourist resorts are people who, like me, live and/or work in the city centre.

enf, there seem also to be lines on the Flickr map. Is this from where videos are taken with start and end points or something else?
posted by ambrosen at 4:57 AM on July 27, 2013

It's always fascinating to see how predictable and limited most tourists' interactions with a given city are.
posted by yoink at 7:28 AM on July 27, 2013

The lines on the Flickr map connect where somebody took a picture in one place and then took another picture somewhere else not too far away.

It didn't work out to try to do the same thing with tweets because the usage patterns are so different: people either tweet over and over from basically the same place (from their home or work or school) or there are gaps of hours or days between tweets so there isn't much connection between the locations. You don't get nice paths that someone has followed like you do with the photos.
posted by enf at 9:57 AM on July 27, 2013

That Mapbox website is great... but I wonder if there's a good way to change the pixels in an add-on like Firebug to make the pixels larger. The red and blue all look the same in most places unless it's an airport or a world class tourist attraction.
posted by crapmatic at 12:32 PM on July 27, 2013