visual data

Always checking your favorite sites for updates, or checking in with Facebook or Foursquare? You’re not alone and Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab can prove it. In addition to sharing your whereabouts, your geographic mark provides insight in examining the psycho-geography and economic terrain of the city.

For their social media study, the Lab used the Foursquare and Facebook Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) access location-based data to determine where social media users broadcast that they are “Here Now”, and have transformed that data into a graphic language that provides a sense of how the city is organized with regards to how people travel around the city, where there are employment and commercial centers, and seasonal preferences...