City Flow: Prototype Exploration for Visualizing Urban Traffic Conversations

Abstract

The paper presents City Flow, an urban traffic visualization prototype based on real post streams captured from Sina Weibo, the most popular social networking site in China. With the increasingly pervasive use of online social networks in China, these new channels attract more users than conventional social media. People use them to seek comments and points exchanges about urgent event and popular news. However, the high noise level precludes conscious or objective standpoints. Especially regarding urban traffic, the challenge is to synthesize some general characteristics of cities rather than to follow a particular event. City Flow captures a mass of data from the conversations about traffic issues through Sina Weibo and generates visualizations of general patterns in addition to including detailed insights. This paper describes the interface design, interaction modes, and data capturing methods. It also presents initial feedback from a usability study and observational findings in terms of the cities' characteristics. Our design considerations present both an overall sentiment and detailed perspectives. We define a hierarchy of categories including City Sentiment, Related Topics, and Time-based Posts Stream based on factors such as topic variables and time-span dynamics. This organizational strategy is intended to guide viewers away from the noise and towards a closer examination of facts. Online social networks add a new dimension of offering views at an individual level rather than authority level when considering social issues. But this contributes to a new phenomenon of people paying excessive attention to their personal views. Our intention is to explore ways to guide people from a micro view towards a macro view in looking into online conversations. Through the prototype of City Flow we experiment and explore the methods of designing for both collective sentiment and individual attitudes on traffic conversations. The main goal is to inspire people to reflect on the general representations and to form opinions by considering individuals' perspectives.