Eric Fischer has posted a new series of visualisations ‘Locals and Tourists‘ depicting the location of photos taken in urban areas around the world. In this

series he attempts to distinguish between those 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) and those by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

I was struck by his ingenious re-use of the existing data to create new information. By exploring individuals posted pictures over time he was able to hypothesise as to whether they were visiting or residing in a particular area. This allowed for a means to compare the gaze of the two groups.

I immediately started to explore his map of Dublin to see if any patterns emerged and then to try and suggest explanations for them. There is a healthy and regular mix of photos by both groups in the central core, but immediately to the east is a large blue box of photos taken by locals. It appears to surround the new Aviva Lansdowne Stadium in Ballsbridge. On the northside there is a similar cluster of photographs by locals taken at the National Botanical Gardens. Interestingly around the Powerscrourt area to the south of the city are a cluster of photographs which cannot be distinguished as being from locals or tourists (yellow in colour). Fischer’s methodology of distinguishing between locals and tourists suggests that the people posting photos of Powerscourt revisit the area on an irregular basis or post pictures irregularly from only a select group of places. Interesting.

The most practical application of Locals versus tourists is to consider how a visitor might use these visualisations to find the hidden city known only to its inhabitants – to find those secret spots worthy of capture by locals, but seemingly missed in the tourist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geotaggers’ World Atlas‘ looking at from where the pictures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

Yesterday I had the honour of giving the first seminar in the Long Room Hub Methods Series at Trinity. I presented a paper entitled ‘Visualising Historical Data’ to a packed room. We had 45 people in the room, some sitting on the floor, and apparently another dozen or so were turned away at the door. Jennifer Edmond gave me a warm and thoughtful introduction and I then launched into a high-level discussion of a few of the very interesting and innovative tools and methods available for working with both structured and unstructured text and numbers. The talk was intended to merely spark interest and hope that attendees might be inspired to try something new with their own research data.

The talk explored tag clouds of a couple varieties, tree maps, timelines, and introduced OpenCalais as a machine driven means to apply context to data. We had a very fruitful discussion afterward as attendees raised some very intriguing questions ranging from issues of visual misrepresentation, the role of the consumer of the visualisation in the making judgements, as well as privacy and the crucial importance of not losing sight of traditional research fundamentals in the glitz of technological toys. I attempted to convey the use of data visualisation for both analytical process and as a means of presenting research findings. Technology forced me to present using PDF as the presentation driver and thankfully the last minute change came off without a hitch. Hopefully, if technology cooperated, the talk will be available for public consumption through iTunes U very shortly.

It was my pleasure to be invited to give the talk and I thank Jason McElligott and Jennifer Edmonds fo the opportunity. I was enormously pleased by the interest in data visualisation in the humanities and certainly this looks like a very ripe area for the DHO to focus some efforts as part of our mandate.

The talk was delivered in the Trinity Irish Art Research Centre which is housed in the renovated Provost’s House Stables. A very unique location and a rather cool architectural reuse.