Towards (Re)Constructing Narratives from Georeferenced Photographs through Visual Analytics

Abstract

We present a study that explores methodological steps towards (re)constructing collective narratives from the photo-taking behaviour of two groups (foreign tourists and inhabitants of Switzerland) by analysing spatial and temporal patterns in user-contributed, georeferenced photographs of Zurich, Switzerland. We reason that the photographers typically capture a scene or a moment because they want to remember or share it, thus these scenes or moments are meaningful to them. Various scholars suggest that the human experience (i.e. this meaningfulness) is what separates a place from the mathematical descriptions of space. While this notion is well known in larger geographic literature, it is under-explored in cartographic research. We respond to this research gap and reconstruct static and dynamic patterns of photo-taking and -sharing behaviour to assist in capturing the implicit meaning in the studied locations. These locations may be meaningful to only a certain group of people in certain moments; therefore, studying group differences in spatial and temporal photo-taking patterns will help building a collective and comparative story about the studied place. In our study, we focus on experiences of foreign versus domestic visitors, and in the process, we examine the potential (and feasibility) of georeferenced photographs for extracting such collective narratives using qualitative and quantitative visual analytical methods.

Keywords:

• narrative
• user-generated content
• UGC
• VGI
• Flickr
• place
• trajectory
• trajectory network
• tourism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to extend our thanks to Dr Georg Fuchs (Geographic Knowledge Discovery Group, Fraunhofer Institute IAIS, Germany) and his colleagues for providing the base dataset.