Skift Take

The under-appreciated Flickr service is filled with insights about travel and tourism that are just begging to be explored.

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, below], with expanding colored disks indicating the popularity of a certain viewpoints.

… His findings, which won him an Honor Award at the American Society of Landscape Architects 2012 Student Awards, deliver a new, precise understanding of how people see what’s around them.

Download (PDF, 3.81MB)

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Tags: flickr, photography, social media

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