Smelly Maps: The Digital Life of Urban Smellscapes (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS14) - WIMS '14, 2014
The rapid rise of Web 2.0 technologies and the popularity of social media, together with the broad use of low cost smart devices, changed dramatically the way users receive information, but also gave them the ability to become significant contributors of disseminated data. The challenge now is to benefit from large volumes of data and collective intelligence, so as to detect what people think or discuss in virtual communities, at the time that an event happens or the information is spread. Our domain of interest is the Urban Air Quality (UAQ) and public health. We want to promote the potential use of social media as a real-time source of "sensing" the environmental load or the existing environmental condition that affects directly humans' quality of life. With the use of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), we analyze posts gathered from Twitter and we identify existing UAQ conditions, based on users' reports. Clusters of tweets with similar topics of discussion are formed. We additionally investigate the relations between citizens' reports and the corresponding, in time and location, actual observations of specific environmental characteristics. With a thorough investigation of SOM visualizations, we conclude that there is a positive correlation between personal observations and official data, highlighting thus the agreement among soft sensors' (users) and hard sensors' (monitoring sites) measurements.
Location, emotion and the senses: a virtual dérive smellmap of Paris
Immerse yourself in a tour of a city in which you meander based on odour using associative memories to guide you to other memorable locations, to hidden emotions. Designed with the intent of investigating connections between scents and a city this study uses design to show how emotion, location and memory can be linked at semiotic and personal levels. It explores those links in the form of an art installation, a smell-induced “virtual dérive” smellmap experience through an urban landscape. The audience response was one of quiet reflection, their sniffing was a three-stage process, their written contributions led to an understanding of how certain smells induce types of behaviours and reactions – the smell of coffee induced people to write a story, the scent of wooden floors brought to mind a different era. Smellmapping poses its own problems; smells are ephemeral thus forcing us to consider the nature of temporality in such creations. Consideration also needs to be taken of how to lead the audience through the landscape. The urban landscape belongs to the humans who populate it; future smell maps need to belong to the permanent and transient populations who inhabit that space.
Smellmap: Amsterdam - Olfactory Art & Smell Visualisation
Creating a smellmap of a city is a collaborative exercise. During a series of smellwalks, local participants identify distinct aromas emanating from specific locations and record the description, expectation, intensity, personal association, and reaction. I then analyse this data, along with conversations arising from the walks, and select a set of smells that convey the smellscape of the city at that moment in time, visualsing the scents and their locations in the city as a “map”. The resulting map visualisations are propositions: indications of what one might smell in a certain place. The map is accompanied by scents, which are the nasal stimuli, and a catalyst for discussion. This visualisation/olfactory art emphasises human interaction with a vast set of contestable sensory data.
Researching Urban Olfactory Environments and Place through Sensewalking
Contemporary professional built environmental practices are dominated by considerations of the visual and auditory with little direct thought being given to the role and experiencing of the olfactory in the regeneration and re-development of urban environments. The human body is however a fully sensing organism and draws from olfactory clues in the experiencing and cognitive processing of towns and cities and the streets, squares and spaces within them. In recent years, sensewalking has developed as a qualitative method of exploring aspects of the physical and/or cognitive experience of being within a particular, often urban, environment. The method, which can be located within feminist and ecological epistemologies, thus offers a potentially useful means of investigating and analysing the everyday urban olfactory experience of place. Drawing from the experience of carrying out a series of olfactory walks with research participants in the town centre of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, this paper explores the use of sensewalking as a method for investigating the olfactory environment of towns and cities and argues that sensewalking provides a valuable means of understanding the olfactory contribution to place, providing valuable insights into the physical and social environment. Of relevance to research involving the bodily experiencing of place, and of interest to researchers and town and city managers alike, the authors will offer insights into epistemological and practical issues that are likely to be experienced as part of the journey.
Characterizing Urban Landscapes Using Geolocated Tweets
2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 International Confernece on Social Computing, 2012
The pervasiveness of cell phones and mobile social media applications is generating vast amounts of geolocalized user-generated content. Since the addition of geotagging information, Twitter has become a valuable source for the study of human dynamics. Its analysis is shedding new light not only on understanding human behavior but also on modeling the way people live and interact in their urban environments. In this paper, we evaluate the use of geolocated tweets as a complementary source of information for urban planning applications. Our contributions are focussed in two urban planing areas: (1) a technique to automatically determine land uses in a specific urban area based on tweeting patterns; and (2) a technique to automatically identify urban points of interest as places with high activity of tweets. We apply our techniques in Manhattan (NYC) using 49 days of geolocated tweets and validate them using land use and landmark information provided by various NYC departments. Our results indicate that geolocated tweets are a powerful and dynamic data source to characterize urban environments.
Spatial-temporal characterization of an urban environment using Twitter
2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2014
This paper presents a study of the usage of Twitter within the context of urban activity. We retrieved a set of tweets submitted by users located in Mexico City. Tweets were labeled as either positive or negative mood using a sentiment analyzer implementation. By calculating the average mood, we were able to run a Mann-Withney's U test to evaluate differences in the calculated mood per day of week. We found that all days of the week had significantly different medians with Sunday being the most positive day and Thursday the most negative. Additionally, we study the location for the tweets as an indicator important events and landmarks around the city.
2017
Conventional planning of cities is usually based on surveys and other hard evidence collected and organized by the cities’ officials and research institutions. The data is usually collected in certain time intervals and it provides a limited overview to the use of urban space. Social media, including online social networks, make available vast amounts of data which nowadays is easily obtained for various types of analyses. Cities have a chance to explore social media data as a new source to study urban dynamics and complement traditional data used for urban planning. Perhaps the new data sources could also be used to overcome limitations in traditional data used in planning. In this paper, we investigated data available in Untappd, a mobile phone application for sharing beer drinking experiences, in the context of planning and place branding in Curitiba. Curitiba recently announced the creation of a Craft Beer Street, to promote local beers. By using this as a real case study we inv...
City of the People, for the People: Sensing Urban Dynamics via Social Media Interactions
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018
Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of cities is in the heart of many applications including urban planning, zoning, and real-estate construction. So far, much of our understanding about urban dynamics came from traditional surveys conducted by persons or by leveraging mobile data in the form of Call Detailed Records. However, the high financial and human cost associated with these methods make the data availability very limited. In this paper, we investigate the use of large scale and publicly available user contributed content, in the form of social media posts to understand the urban dynamics of cities. We build activity time series for different cities, and different neighborhoods within the same city to identify the different dynamic patterns taking place. Next, we conduct a cluster analysis on the time series to understand the spatial distribution of patterns in the city. Our instantiation for the two cities of London and Doha shows the effectiveness of our method.