Abstract
Abstract. Every day millions of social media users upload information as texts, pictures or likes. These online posts are nowadays mainly uploaded via a smartphone, that adds automatically complementary pieces of information such as the device’s location and orientation. This additional material is valuable for public services, and can be used to reinforce knowledge provided by typical methods. This study aims to inquire this additional material to observe the influence of city features on public behavior. A semi-automated workflow is introduced to combine two large datasets: the flickR geo-referenced photos (associated with their shooting orientation) and the OpenStreetMap streets’ network. The study is conducted in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland. This workflow promotes a novel approach to download, filter, compute and visualize large cluttered datasets. The investigations showed a significant difference between South/North photos’ orientation with a South dominance. Furthermore, the photographs’ orientation appears to be related to the street network, or city elements (such as remarkable buildings, fountains) only at a local scale; no connection was established at a larger scale. These results can be useful in urban planning for the diagnosis of a public place practice by its users (i.e., residents, tourists, etc.). An improved diagnosis promotes a better knowledge of a public space’s remarkable elements (by their attractiveness or unsightliness), easing the decision on conservation or transformation of these elements. Other applications are also outlined, notably in the touristic sector or the landscape preservation.
Highlights
Nowadays data holds a prominent place in all sectors of our everyday life
Non-experts users, through the production of these data, are increasingly holding a role of partners alongside experts, even seen as sensors emphasized by the development of public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS) and volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007)
We were able to combine VGI data with geo-referenced photographs from social media to investigate how city features could affect the behavior of enthusiast photographers
Summary
Data is used in numerous contexts such as finding the shortest path for road navigation, suggesting new movies to watch, classifying user profiles for targeted advertisement, or even creating art. This trend is based on a drastic increase in computational and storage capacity (Hilbert & López, 2011). Passive participation frequently involves data analytics, i.e. resolving issues using information not published for this specific purpose. In this case, participants are not always aware that their data is used for other purposes. This method has the benefits of being indirect, supporting the collection of latent information (considered not worth sharing by the users, or avoided to be shared consciously)
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