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On Broadway

Interactive application and a public installation commissioned by New York Public Library for its exhibition "The Public Eye," 2014-2016. See full list of project artists and contributors: http://on-broadway.nyc/

How does a "data city" look like? 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, created from the activities and media shared by hundreds of thousands of people. 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.

Images and data include 660,000 Instagram photos shared along Broadway during six months in 2014, Twitter posts with images for the same period, Google Street View images, over 8 million Foursquare check-ins (2009-2014), 22 million taxi pickups and drop-offs (2013), and income averages for the part of the city crossed by Broadway from US Census Bureau (2013).

Awards

Group Exhibitions