Invisible Cities - Web 2.0 for the Desktop

Visualising virtual activity location based and linking it visually to the urban locations it takes place is one of the ideas of New City Landscape (NCL). Using the twitter feed the location based tweets are aggregated and the density is mapped as a virtual landscape. This landscape's features are named after the corresponding real world places, creating a sense of place and orientation.

However, so far the NCL maps have been static and in retrospect, representing a week worth of data about the specific urban area they portrait.

Around the same time Christian Marc Schmidt has developed a similar approach focusing on Manhattan, but visualising in real time twitter and flickr activity. The density landscape here is mapped using the aerial photos morphing it over rising and falling peaks. He takes the aspect of real time into account and focuses the visualisation on what is happening just now.


Image taken from Invisible City / Aerial view of a topic path with the earliest record selected.

The project has now developed in to a standalone desktop version that can be played around with locally. It connects to twitter and flickr loading the most recent activity of the past 24 hours. The applet is Java based and runs on Mac and Windows.

The landscape is based on the activity, each message or photo is shown as a white dot. Hovering over dots reveals the message and details, plus draws links to previous or following messages. These paths are generated from topics listed on te right hand side of the window. If a node belongs to a topic path, navigation will also appear at the top of the view with previous/next buttons to move chronologically along the path.

Schmidt explains: "Invisible Cities, a project named after the novel by Italo Calvino, aims to provide insight into the composition of urban social networks by surfacing data from online services, geographically mapped, in order to identify the areas of high and low activity. The visualization thus reveals emerging social themes, presented in a three-dimensional spatial environment. It displays individual Twitter status updates and Flickr photos on a geo-registered surface reflecting aggregate activity over time. As data records are accrued, the surface transforms into hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data. Data points are connected in chronological order by paths representing themes extracted from status updates and image metadata."


Image taken from Invisible City / A selected photo as part of a two-node topic path.

You can download the Java App for MacOSx or Windows. A detailed description pdf can be read HERE and the project website with more screnshots and clips can be found HERE.

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New City Landscapes - Interactive Tweetography Maps

Over the past few months we have been harvesting geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Via a radius of 30km around New York, London, Paris, Munich we have collated the number of Tweets and created our New City Landscape Maps.

New York New City Landscape

Image by single-blogs using the GMap Image Cutter / New York 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 highest New York point is the Time Square Peak. It sits within a ridge running down the lengt of Manhattan. It drops of in the south shortly after Chinatown Head and Little Italy Side. A second group of mountains are location around the Franklin Avenue Rock and a third in the Jamaica area.

The maps were created using our Tweet-O-Meter, in association with DigitalUrban and coded by Steven Gray, this New City Landscape represents location based twitter activity.


Image by DigitalUrban / Screenshot of the Tweet-O-Meter showing New York, London, Paris and Munich.

The data is derived from tweets sent via a mobile device that includes the location at the time of sending the message. The contours correspond to the density of tweets, the mountains rise over active locations and cliffs drop down in to calm valleys, flowing out to tweet deserts. Throughout the emerging landscape features have been renamed to reflect these conditions. Embedded below a zoomable version of London, created using CASA GM Image Cutter software software developed by Richard Milton, you can zoom in and pan around just as you would do on Google Maps.

London New City Landscape

Image by single-blogs using the GMap Image Cutter / London 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.

In this visualisation London does not show the normally characteristic East-West differentiation. Here it is a more North-South directed structure. The highest peak is Soho Mountain in the centre of London extending Eastward towards Liverpool Street.

Munich New City Landscape

Image by single-blogs using the GMap Image Cutter / Munich 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.

Paris New City Landscape

Image by single-blogs using the GMap Image Cutter / Paris 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. This map was created with the support of Annick Labeca.

‘New York, London, Paris, Munich everybody talk about Pop Musik’ – that was 1979 and the catch line by the group M. This was the start of the project, to mine what people are talking about in 2010. This has led to the creation of our New City Landscape maps.

Images of the maps can also be found on flickr. More cities are coming soon….

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