Elephant Path

This provides a way to explore and discover a region through the shared experience of its inhabitants and visitors.

Elephant Path as been developed using the numerous data access, information processing and visualization capabilities of the Impure visual programming language. Impure also offers the possibility to easily embed the Elephant Path interface into your web site or copy the code and the data into your own workspace to brew an improved version.

The information is extracted from the content people generate on Wikipedia, Flickr and Geonames. For each region, Elephant Path lists Wikipedia entries and selects some of the monuments, parks, and other popular sites with a story. It consolidates the the Wikipedia entries with geographical coordinates via the Geonames API. Then, it uses the Flickr API to collect the information photographers share at these locations. Finally is applies our own network data analysis algorithms to filter the data, produce travel sequences and measure photogenic levels.

This project led us to the development of a ‘Photogenic indicator’ that fuses the analysis of social network activity collected with street segment information to provide with measures on the Points of Interest in cities where this type information is not available.

This service accesses data publicly available and legally accessible on the photo sharing platforms. With the filtering of geographical references, timestamps and other public information we produced a table with social network activity to cities shapefiles.
The process feeds this data to geospatial analysis algorithms that calculate the social network activity per street segment. The measures are augmented by qualitative information with the application of word frequency algorithms on the tags that describe the photos.

The Photogenic indicator is now a novel source of information on a city that can feed the geographical information provided by navigation systems.