An Urban Image Stimulus Set Generated from Social Media

Abstract

Social media data, such as photos and status posts, can be tagged with location information (geotagging). This geotagged information can be used for urban spatial analysis to explore neighborhood characteristics or mobility patterns. With increasing rural-to-urban migration, there is a need for comprehensive data capturing the complexity of urban settings and their influence on human experiences. Here, we share an urban image stimulus set from the city of Lisbon that researchers can use in their experiments. The stimulus set consists of 160 geotagged urban space photographs extracted from the Flickr social media platform. We divided the city into 100 × 100 m cells to calculate the cell image density (number of images in each cell) and the cell green index (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index of each cell) and assigned these values to each geotagged image. In addition, we also computed the popularity of each image (normalized views on the social network). We also categorized these images into two putative groups by photographer status (residents and tourists), with 80 images belonging to each group. With the rise in data-driven decisions in urban planning, this stimulus set helps explore human–urban environment interaction patterns, especially if complemented with survey/neuroimaging measures or machine-learning analyses.