The World’s Eyes

The World’s Eyes is a project from the MIT SENSEable Lab that uses Flickr as a tool for tracking photographers’ travels through Spain. By using Flickr, you can track lots of information about the user and the photograph, from the hometown of the photographer to the geolocation of where the image was taken. This results in a lot of interesting data that might uncover interesting tidbits of what is interesting to people. For example, if two people take an image in the same place, then it’s probably of more interest than a place that only one photographer has captured. If three people take an image in that place, then its even more of a hotspot, and so on and so forth.

I’m very interested in using this kind of subconscious attraction to certain things to put together information about human behavior and visual culture, so something like this is very interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be an ongoing project, but some of the visuals are interesting nonetheless, and the concept behind it is very thought-provoking. I chose this because out of all the things I looked at, it struck closest to home, and I was thinking about possibly using Flickr as an aggregation tool for our upcoming project, so I wanted to see what it had been used for already. Out of all the visualizations involving Flickr I could find, this seemed to be the most meaningful.