The Color of our Environment, Flickr as a paintbrush

Andy Woodruff has developed an interesting algorithm that processes images on Flickr for a specific geographical area and builds a colormap, similar to a heatmap, of the various colors found in that area.

This being a blog about maps, I of course mean Harvard not as a school but as a geographic entity. What color is the landscape, physical and cultural? When people look around at whatever interests them, what colors are they looking at?

Independently mapping the intensity and hue of the various colors, and connecting it with the geo-tagging data for the images, creates some pretty interesting maps.  Still a work-in-progress, but I look forward to seeing where it leads.

via Cartogrammar.com | Blog » Flickr as a paintbrush. via Information Aesthetics

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.