“Introduction to Data Analysis in the TechniCity…Applied Apps… Crowdsourcing… Mobile Technologies… Open Trip Planner Analyst… Geoweb…How to Access Foursquare and Jiepan Checkin… How to Analyse StreetSeen… How to Use StreetSeen… How to Create a Map… Four Square Checkins Around the Globe… How to Scrape Twitter.. Sentiment Analysis… Urban Network Analysis… ”
Talk about crowdsourcing as a method of data collection.
Crowdsourcing is about outsourcing tasks to a large group of people to achieve specific goals e.g. learn about citizen’s desires.
Detailed case study of crowdsourcing in Cincinnati’s plan for a bike share program (to see where people wanted a bike share station) combined with spatial analysis, and content analysis, to determine where people are interested to have a station and why (e.g. access to cafe, restaurant, or bar).
There are a lot of mobile applications out there that can really help us in creating better, stronger, healthier cities.
Asked planners what mobile applications they needed, they responded they wanted those that would:
allow them to engage with the public;
have spatial aspects to them;
have the ability to collect data, that they could use in their planning projects.
Examples of apps:
The US Census Bureau’s America’s Economy to share key economic indicators;
Sitgeist tells you about the neighborhood that you’re in;
Parks Pittsburgh tells you about parking garages and how many spaces are open;
CycleTracks captures route cycled, and speed and distance etc;
INRIX is a transportation app that helps you to figure out what the best route is to take;
Zoner tells you the land use regulations;
Singapore has put their entire master plan on a mobile application;
Abu Dhabi has developed mobile applications that are on their iPads that allow the planners to take information into the field;
Open Tree Map allows the public to document tree locations, tree types;
Baltimore, Maryland, has created a mobile app that allows people to look at the different events and places and locations and activities that are happening.
OpenTripPlanner helps to sense of complex transit networks.
Behind the scenes OpenTripPlanner is using layers of data: information about the transit network itself, the roads and the transit lines, and it uses the actual transit network and the scheduled service to produce different analyses.
You can optimize for time, or for distance or cost.
Example: Consider proposed transit line that loops around the north, east of Washington DC. Using, OpenTripPlanner, an the transit analysis tools, we can explore what would happen if a new line with new scheduled service was running.
How layers of geographic data can be used for practical purposes, like finding places, getting directions and capturing user feedback.
This is an intersection between the digital world and the physical world e.g. physical places on the ground are layered with dense digital data.
Academics call this digital information about physical place, the GeoWeb, and it is all of the digital data that is in some way tagged to a physical spot on the globe.
So what are the implications of all of this? Will digital information change how we experience actual places and cities? Will different places (even within the same city, or across cities) have different amounts of digital information, thus creating an inequality of digital information?
There is a straight forward simple way to analyze StreetSeen and draw some basic conclusions.
And a more detailed discrete choice model way, which requires a statistical background.
One of the key things in designing a StreetSeen survey is that you want to consider what is it that your asking people about e.g. which street would you prefer to ride a bicycle on and then, we want to understand what are the differences between these two images.
Detailed explanation of the discrete choice model approach.
Use social media to tell stories about the places that we live.
From connecting with friends and sharing images, to exploring cities through location-based applications, social media has given a different vantage point for understand, explore, navigate, and geographically record the places we live.
Sites such as Foursquare and Facebook allow us to spatially mark forays in the city, creating rich databases that hold digital imprints of interactions.
Social media apps users register far more than what they are doing: they create a psychological map of the city because the data registered reveals when and where social media users are going through an emotion crisis, experiencing their own personal heaven or hell, or observing an unusual phenomenon.
The project Here Now, Social Media in the Psychological City by the Civic Data Design Lab, show how users of social media sites, Foursquare and Facebook, create economic and emotional map layers that operate in social media virtual city.
It is clear that social media can be used to see the city through the eyes of the people experiencing it on the ground.
The virtual city can be personalized, as it expresses one’s individual encounters with the places they mark.
This story of place is not guided by any predetermined survey or governmental data set; it allows us to explore the city through the eyes of the citizens when they are experiencing it and creating a psychological map of the city.
