Eric Fischer is the prescient data artist behind several well-circulated recent visualization, like Locals and Tourists and the 2010 Race and Ethnicity dot maps. Infosthetics posted Fischer’s latest project early this morning, a geo-located Twitter/Flicker mashup that compares each program’s density of use across the globe. See Something or Say Something plots orange dots to represent Flickr use, while blue show Tweets. US-specific and Global versions of the maps are after the break.

Some of Fischer’s results are unsurprising (i.e., they reinforce broad generalizations I like to make): Southerners are more verbose, while strong-and-silent Westerners tend to produce images more often than text. Globally, Flickr use seems to correspond to the most dramatic geographic locations (the Adriatic coast line, Iceland in general, and the coastline of much of South America).

Fischer himself has the following to say about the project:

“There’s not a whole lot of technology behind it. It’s a C program that runs through the photos/tweets in chronological order, plotting the earliest ones the most brightly and stepping the brightness down for points that don’t show up for the first time until later on. Points are also allowed to diffuse by a few pixels when there is an additional record for a point that is already plotted, with the brightness falling off exponentially as the point that is actually plotted gets further from its intended location. Each pixel is the somewhat weird area of 2.25 square miles because a smaller area made the whole-world image too big for Flickr to let me post it.”

You can see his beautiful photostream here.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in New Projects

tagged data, erich fisher, flickr, maps, twitter, visualization

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