ncl | urbantick

Virtual Landscape and a Peak for the London 2012 Olympic Park

By: admin_urbantick

05-09-2012

I will be speaking at the Society of Cartographers 48th Annual Conference today. The talk will focus on the New City Landscape maps under the title New City Landscape Maps: Urban Areas According to Tweet Density.

The maps are visualising location based tweet activity in urban areas and part of the talk will focus on urban morphology and real world feature to influence the virtual activity. The range of maps produced show that unique conditions exist for different cities from around the world and this is reflected in the Twitter landscape maps.

Three types have been identified showing similar characteristics. A type with one central core are, a type with several different islands of high activity and a type showing an area or shape of high activity.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Top row central type, middle row feature type and bottom row island type.

Also we have been monitoring Twitter activity in London during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Whilst this is still ongoing a first preview of the data is showing a surprising shift of activity, a new addition to the landscape of the NCL-London map respectively.

There has an actual peak appeared over the area of the Olympic park with masses of location based tweets. It is something we have always talked about in presentations of the maps in the past couple of month and here it is, it finally did show up as a major ‘landmark’ in the virtual map of London.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Locationbased Twitter activity in London during the London 2012 Olympic Games. The Olympic park on the right does show up as a remarkable peak during the early period of the Olympic Games. A final version will be produced in the after the end of the Paralympic Games.

Temporal Aspects of the City

By: admin_urbantick

26-01-2012

Uncategorised

I am giving a presentation to the MRes course at CASA, UCL today. There are two part to this lecture. The first part is covering the PhD research with a focus on the city and an overview of the methods of investigation that have been used. It is organised along the main topics of Time, Space, Morphology and Networks, but also covers Ethics and Mental Maps or Identity as aspects.

The second part really is a tutorial explaining the production of the New City Landscape maps. It covers pretty much all the steps from the preparation of the raw CSV file to the export of the map from Illustrator. A large aspect is the data handling in ArcGIS and how to perform the analysis as well as the exporting and inter compatibility with other software. Arc just doesn’t produce any pretty results so it is essential to extend the workflow to other software packages. Softwares used: TextEdit, ArcGIS, Illustrator, Google Earth, Cartographica.

Andy Hudson-Smith over at DigitalUrban will pick up with a third part and a second part to this tutorial talking through how he developed a 3D model of the landscape map and visualised it in Lumion. The result of this workflow is embedded below.

Digital Media – Alphaville Festival

By: admin_urbantick

23-09-2011

Uncategorised

This weekend from today the Alphaville Festival is under way providing a platform for digital media and art to be shown, discussed and explored across different venues in East London.

It is the third year for this growing digital-media platform and this years theme is “Zeitgeist, from digital to post-digital. This is very much picking up on how Negroponte put it already back in 1998 in WIRED “The digital revolution is over”.

Image taken from Alphaville / ‘Cell’, concept by James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda (2011)

The 2011 edition provides an online and live platform to explore, test and disseminate new deas, emerging trends, collaborations and groundbreaking works. Running from 22-25 September the programme presents social media and interactive art, open labs, meet-ups, talks, workshops and screenings alongside with live music, visual performances and parties. Taking place longside the London Design Festival, the 2011 edition enables a network of satellite events spreading across different London boroughs and links with other European cities such as Madrid (Twin Gallery) and Brussels & The Hague (Todays Art). Selected venues include Netil House, Rich Mix, Space Studios, Vortex Jazz Club, XOYO, Hearn Street Warehouse and Whitechapel Gallery. The festival programme also connects east and west London thorough a link with the V&A Digital Design Weekend.

Image taken from Alphaville / Bitquid by Jeroen Holthuis (Photo by Ansis Starks)

The festival will have gathering artists, creative coders, new media technologists, designers, architects, professionals,
musicians, researchers and academics, some of the key names are: Tom Uglow (Google Creative
Labs), Marius Watz, Filip Visnjic (Creative Applications), Man Bartlett, Daito Manabe, Moritz
Stefaner, Keiichi Matsuda, James Alliban, Pantha Du Prince, Matthew Dear, Jon Hopkins,
Jacaszek and Kangding Ray.

There is a range of events including performances, talks and exhibitions. On Saturday 13h00 I will be giving a talk t the Innovation Space in Netil House. Networked Cities I will be discussing some of the Twitter visualisation we have created for the NCL project. This wil mainly focus on Ljubljana, Den Haag and Brussels in terms of activity, network and spatial diversity.

A map to find the different venues can be found below. Tickts can be bougt at the venues or online HERE. To get a previe HERE is and interview with PANTHA DU PRINCE who will be playing at the festival or a sound mix teaser below.

Alpha-ville Festival 2011 Mix by Alpha-ville

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New City Landscape – Singapore – one Island

By: admin_urbantick

09-09-2011

Uncategorised

Singapore is an city state with about 5’076’700 inhabitant according to the 2010 census. The society is very technology interested and electronics make a lot of their business.

Digital elements have a strong presence in everyday life, including online social networking. In this sense it is not surprising that Twitter is very popular in Singapore. Also in terms of location sharing, users in Singapore are quite happy to share their location with the tweets. We have about 46% of location based messages. This is only matched by Amsterdam, NL and Lagos, NG. The average over all the locations observed is about 10-12%.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Singapore New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Singapore.

The virtual landscape redraws nicely the outline of the island state. There are the neighboring areas of Malaysia and Indonesia showing up at the top and the bottom respectively of the map. The connection across the water are also showing with tweets send either from a ferry crossing or from one of the two bridges. Beside these connection the international airport on the far most East corner of the island is probably even more important to connect to the outside. It features prominently in the landscape as a tall peak of high tweet activity.

Singapore New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Singapore New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity. Thanks for the naming help to Kai from 3rdlifekaidie.

Overall the virtual landscape beautifully redraws the outline of the island Singapore is on. The main features that immediately stand out in the Singapore NCL map are the areas message are absent. The large Nature Reserve in the centre is the larges area with reduced Twitter activity, but also the live firing area and reserve on the western side of the island. In line with the other observed urban areas, outdoor spaces show lower Twitter activity.

On the other hand the complete south coast of the island is abuzz with activity. Ranging from Changi International Airport in the East all the way past the container ports to the West tot he industrial areas. The main peak is Dhoby Gaut Peak in the area of the major interchange station on the MRT.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Singapore is an evening city with a clear activity peak between 21h00 and 23h00. Mornings are very slow and it doesn’t really pick up until the late afternoon. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

The languages represented in the Singapore data set are clearly dominated by English and Indonesian. Those two languages cover about 90% of all messages. Interestingly the other few languages featuring are European rather than Asian. There is Dutch, Norwegian, Italian and Spanish, German and French. Also Esperanto again features, though only with for marginal number of tweets.

The platform is dominated by twitter for iPhone, followed by twitter for Blackberry, the web and tweetDeck. The iPhone seems very popular in Singapore. Also the iPad features on the tenth rank with twitter for iPad.

The temporal structure of Twitter activity is extremely focused on the evening. No other city has such a strong activity preference as Singapore shows. There is a clear peak between 9pm and 11pm. with a extreme drop of after 1am to nearly zero activity between 4am and 5am. This is followed by a sharp start in the morning around 8am. Through out the day this stays about leveled until it starts to rise in the late afternoon after 6pm.

CRESC Annual Conference 2011 – Framing the City

By: admin_urbantick

07-09-2011

Uncategorised

The CRESC annual conference 2011 ‘Framing the City’ is now taking place from today, 07 September through to Friday 09 September in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music. It is organised by Sophie Watson (Chair), Gillian Evans, Elizabeth Silva and Alban Webb.

Key note speakers include: Ian Sinclair, author of London Orbital and London: City of Disappearances; Alistair Bonnett, author of Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia; Maria Kaika author of City of Flows; Roselund Lennart, author of Exploring the City with Bourdieu: Applying Pierre Bourdieu?s theories and methods to study the community; Talja Blokland, author of Urban Bonds and co-editor of Networked Urbanism; Nick Couldry author of Why Voice Matters Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism.

Image by urbanTick for NCLn / Location based social network based on Twitter data collected in central Europe focusing on Switzerland. Colours indicating message language. The main languages are, Italian=blue, English=orange, French=red, German=green.
The bottom line are external nodes for which we have no location information.

I will be presenting today at the conference in a session called ‘Change and Moulding’ in the afternoon. The paper New City Landscapes and Virtual Urban Social Networks is looking at how physical elements are shaping the virtual world. In detail this is how physical aspects of the location can be found as influencing parameters of the virtual description. Overall this forms an argument as to why and how digital social networking data can be useful for decision making and planning.

Increasingly people use digital or online networks to communicate and interact. This changes the social scape of the urban area and with it the interactive hot spots change and fluctuate throughout the city as individuals follow the narrative path of their everyday routines. People leave messages, distribute news and respond to conversations not only in traditional locations anymore but potentially anywhere in the city.
This paper discusses the emerging potential of social media data used for urban area research and city planning. Also aspects of visualisation as well as privacy and ethical implications are discussed. The information gathered from social media networks usually can be associated with a physical location for example via the GPS of the smart phone. For this virtual social infrastructure mapping project, the data is derived from the Twitter micro blogging service.
The data is mapped as a virtual landscape on top of the real landscape connecting it via the common place names. At the same time the data is used to visualize the social network across these virtual-real places and in this way can make visible the places were people link the virtual and the real world in urban areas around the globe.

RGS Annual Conference 2011

By: admin_urbantick

01-09-2011

Uncategorised

The Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2011 is under way this week in London. It opened yesterday under the topic The Geographical Imagination and is chaired by Stephen Daniels, University of Nottingham.
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As every year it is going to be a very big event with a lot of paralel sessions. I will be presenting some aspects of the twitter New City Landscape research. The presentation is part of the session organised by Ladan Cockshut of Durham University under the title “Getting lost on the way to Farmville“. Virtual, mobile and online spaces of interaction: Exploring the emerging geography and culture of new media technologies. The session starts at 09h00 and is located in the Skempton Building in Room 163 on the Imperial College campus.

The session has four presentations discussing the aspects of emerging social networking geographies. Two of the papers are based on gaming culture and the aspects of locality. One is presented by Kenneth Lim discussing Second Life and especially the SS Galaxy, a cruse ship. Lim’s interest for this part of Second Life stems from the view that a cruse ship is a self contained space providing all the essentials for living whilst on the move. There are of course very interesting connections to be drawn to the 1920 with Le Corbusier for example. He viewed the ocean liner at the ultimate city and admired its independence.

THe second gaming paper will be presented by Ladan Cockshut on Spatial and Interactive Dynamics in World of Warcraft. The third paper is by Amil Mohanan from UCL on the net neutrality debate discussing priotised datatransfer in the network by OFCOM and the possible emergence of a two-tiered market.

My paper is going o be the fourth contribution under the title New City Landscape – Mapping urban online spaces of interaction. The data for this paper is derived from the Twitter service, where users can send information as 140 character message. The platform allows to maintain a pool of followers (friends) with whom one shares the tweets (messages). Technically it is possible to collect every tweet sent via the open API (application programming interface) gaining access to millions of location based messages. From the collected data a new landscape based on density is generated. The features of this landscape of digital activity correspond directly with the physical location of their origin but at the same time represent with hills the peaks of locations from where a lot of messages are sent. The flanks and valleys stand for areas with lesser activity and vast plains and deserts of no tweets stretch across the townscapes. These New City Landscape maps (NCL) don’t represent any physical features, but the interaction with physical features on a temporal basis. The digital realm has become as much part of the urban environment as the physical features and with these tweetography maps they are made visible for the first time.

London aNCL

By: admin_urbantick

24-08-2011

Uncategorised

London was the first city we collected Twitter data for when we started to create the New City Landscape (NCL) project, monitoring location based Twitter activity in urban areas. This was back in May 2010 and since we have collected data for a lot more cities from around the world.

We have now finally also an animated NCL (aNCL) version using the same dataset. This part of the project was only developed earlier this year in collaboration with Anders Johansson at CASA and we are trying to catch up on the different cities we have data for. A series of aNCL visualisations has already been realised.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Showing four screenshots taken from the aNCL visualisation for a weeks worth of Tweets in and around London. The timings are midnight, morning, afternoon and evening. Each do is a tweet, re-tweets show a lin between sender and re-sender.

There are only very few features we are using for these visualisations. A characteristic landscape feature to roughly describe the urban area and the 30 km collection radius parameter to provide scale. Other than that there are only the individual Twitter messages that were collected over the period of one week. THe animation superimposes all seven days in to 24 hours.

With the visualisation we are highlighting the way information disseminates through re-tweeting of messages. An RT message will show a thin yellow line between original sender and re-sender. The information travels at some speed, which is based on the time it takes between sending and resending.

London, even though the data is already a year old is compared to other cities a very busy place in Twitter terms. We have a lot of individual messages, but more interesting there are quite a lot of different interactions happening simultaneously. Where as other cities don’t show a lot of interaction, in London the sharing of information is quite an important part of tweeting. An interactive, but static activity map can be found at London NCL.

Its great to see how London wakes up between 07h30 and 09h00 in the morning after a moderat night. Then there is however, not very much sharing at this point of the day. Only after lunch and especially later in the afternoon the sharing really starts in London. It is almost as if the city was to digest the information it had created earlier in the day, reprocessing it and passing it on.

Barcelona New City Landscape

By: admin_urbantick

22-07-2011

Uncategorised

Barcelona is in terms of twitter activity one of the cities that has a strong central core of high activity. Very similar to for example the London NCL or the Paris NCL maps.
The highest point is just over the Placa de Catalonia with a steep slope down la Rambla to the Roca Columbus. Other places of high activity are around the parliament, here the ‘Monte di Parliament Catalonia’ and around the Olympic centre on Montjuic.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Barcelona New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Barcelona.

The Barcelona New City Landscape map has already been published earlier, but it needed an update because of some problems in the processing and labeling. This new version also goes in line with the adjusted layout and design.

Thanks for the help with the map go to Narcis Sastre, who kindly worked it through.

Barcelona New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Barcelona New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

Barcelona is very active in the afternoon hours. There is a peak around 15h00, 18h00 and 21h00, after which it quickly drops off. The mornings are very pronounced right after six, however overall far less than the afternoon. Over lunch there is clearly a dip with lesser activity.

Spanish is clearly the dominating language, followed by English. Indonesian, French, Portuguese and Italian are sort of the runner ups. ALso Esperanto is there, this is surprisingly often present in the top ten list and it seems that a lot of people are using it as a statement, since it is not really a spoken language.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Barcelona is a afternoon city with more activity between three and nine than through out the rest of the day. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

Also, we have the animation ready for the Barcelona data set. This one is put together in collaboration with Anders Johanson. The animation also shows the interaction between the users based on RT and @ tweets with thin yellow lines. This indicates a direction and provides a sense for the distribution of flows.

New City Landscape – Calgary

By: admin_urbantick

14-07-2011

Uncategorised

Calgary was established in 1875 as Fort Brisebois by the North-West Mounted Police, located at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers in what is now Calgary, Alberta. Today Calgary is the largest city in Alberta and directs an oil and gas empire, making a rather good situated urban centre.

The city is located similar to Denver at the transition zone between the prairie in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. This dominates the views and the impression of the place. However, unlike in Denver the tall mountains are further in the distance. The rockies in Alberta fade out in to the flat land with smaller hills.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / Calgary New City Landscape map generated from location based tweets collected over the period of one week. The area covered is within a 30 km radius of Calgary.

The urban area is quite active on Twitter and the NCL map draws out the city features nicely. The main features are the airport, the downtown, the absent Nose Hill Park. Also the the main movement corridor the famous Calgary Y shape shows up on the map as a North West to South Centre connection with a North East connection via the airport.

Calgary New City Landscape

Image by urbanTick using the GMap Image Cutter / Calgary New City Landscape Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top right corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Explore areas you know close up and find new locations you have never heard of. Click HERE for a full screen view. The maps were created using our CASA Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.

The main peak is over the downtown area as expected. The summit is right above the Scotia Centre building. This central mountain extends to the South West towards the Access Cliff and to the North East to the Highland Park Cliff.

Some of the missing areas are the Nose Hill Park which appears completely empty on the Twitter map with basically no activity. Also around the CPR the tweet desert spreads far, all the way down to the Bennett Forest.

Image taken from Wikimedia / Calgary as it appeared circa 1885.

The Y shaped sequence of hills connecting the downtown area to the outskirts follows the main transport arteries of Calgary, the C-Train.
This transport system is the core of public transport in Calgary and free in the Downtown area but extends beyond. It is accomplished by a bus network.

The City of Calgary is very much a morning city with quite a bit more tweets sent in the morning hours between eight and twelve. The afternoon is slow and the nights early, with the characteristic night dip starting before three and ending soon after four.

The dominating language is clearly English with other languages used on Twitter in this area being very low. For the platforms used the four dominating ones are Twitter for iPhone, Ueber Social, Twitter for Black Berry and the web.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The rose shows the twitter activity per hour of the day, starting at 00:00 at the top, displayed as local time. Calgary is a morning city with more activity between eight and twelve than through out the afternoon and evening. The graphs show the platform of preference used to send the tweet and the language set respectively.

New City Landscape – Mapping Urban Twitter Usage

By: admin_urbantick

06-07-2011

Uncategorised

I am at CUPUM presenting a paper on the ongoing New City Landscape location based Twitter message mapping project. The paper gives an overview of a whole range of aspects this project is working with. Rangin from data collection, ethical discussion of ‘tweets as public data’, mapping the virtual landscapes, to temporal aspects.

Image taken form Attic Postcards / Vintage postcard, dating ‘White Border’ 1915 – 1930, showing the Chateau Lake Louise on the shores of Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada.

The presentation also gives a brief outlook of what the upcoming directions for the project could be. Earlier there were a number of these directions presented on urbanTick. This ranges from crowd sourcing to the tracking of public events or disaster as well as networking, connecting social and spatial aspects.

Some of these are currently being details and for other development of methods is under way. Recently the networking aspects were in the focus. There were network maps based on the London data, but also the Munich data and the San Francisco data. Most recently there were some visuals looking at intercity relationships using a data set that contains tweets for Switzerland were the alps as physical barriers showed up clearly in the network.

The presentation can be found below or on Prezi.org.

— urbantick

Virtual Landscape and a Peak for the London 2012 Olympic Park

Temporal Aspects of the City

Digital Media – Alphaville Festival

New City Landscape – Singapore – one Island

CRESC Annual Conference 2011 – Framing the City

London aNCL

Barcelona New City Landscape

New City Landscape – Calgary

New City Landscape – Mapping Urban Twitter Usage

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