On Broadway - our new interactive urban data visualization
Image and data sources used in the project:
660,000 Instagram photos from 2/2014-7/2014,
Twitter posts with images shared during same period,
8+ million Foursquare check-ins, 2009-2014
Google Street View images (variable dates),
22 million taxi pickups and drop-offs for 2013,
latest economic indicators from US Census Bureau (2013).
How to represent a "data city"? We did not want to show the data in a conventional way using only graphs and numbers. We also did not want to use another convention of showing spatial data – a map. The result of our explorations is "On Broadway": a visually rich image-centric interface, where numbers play only a secondary role, and no maps are used. The project proposes a new visual metaphor for thinking about the city: a vertical stack of image and data layers. There are 13 such layers in the project, all aligned to locations along Broadway. Using our unique interface (available as the online app and in large multi-touch screen installed at New York Public Library as part of "The Public Eye" exhibition), you can see all data at once, or zoom and follow Broadway block by block.
Project website and interactive application:
Group Exhibition:
Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography, New York Public Library (NYPL), December 13, 2013 - January 3, 2016.