iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

🚨 NEW ARTICLE 🚨 How many photos are uploaded to Flickr? Where? By who? Why does any of it matter? We explore the rise and fall of #Flickr in this @digigeolab.bsky.social paper by yours truly, @vuoggis.bsky.social, Johanna Eklund, Anna Hausmann & @tuulitoivonen.bsky.social out now! buff.ly/0hJjPsm

Distribution of the use of Flickr. Three heat maps that show globes roughly centered in Europe and Africa, South-East Asia and the Americas. Use is centered in Europe and North America, and urban areas.

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BONUS ✨ Random highlights from the dataset: 1) Median time between capturing a photo and uploading it to Flickr is one week. 2) People (or bots) like to upload on round figures (see pic) 3) Normalized by population, Iceland has the most Flickr users in our dataset.

Uploads distributed per second of the minute and minutes of the hour. Only the first seconds and minutes diverge significantly, however, for the minutes, people like to upload on round figures (i.e., ten past, half past).

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Thank you to #Kone & Mai and Tor Nessling Foundations for supporting this work. A quantitative work like this would not be possible without a robust suite of FOSS tools. My thanks to the maintainers of #QGIS, #pandas, #geopandas, #duckdb, #dask, #statsmodels, #jupyter and many more!

So, we argue that these trends and biases should be considered if opting for Flickr data. For example, if Flickr is used a proxy does a drop tell about the phenomena or the popularity of Flickr? All research that uses user-generated dataset opportunistically face similar questions.

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(5) Finally, we tested the reliability of data acquisition from the platform and found that the API responds inconsistently to repeated queries.

Outcome of 100 repeated queries to the API. The a pattern not unlike the normal distribution.

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(4) All of this is reflected on who make posts from nature, or protected areas in this case. For example, Europeans and North Americans make about ¾ of the visits to African protected areas on Flickr.

Five 'chord diagrams'. They show connections between the origins and destinations of nature visitors at the level of continents. The majority of these visits are made in Europe and North America, especially as we get closer to present.

(3) Flickr is clearly a platform of the "Global North": it’s users and use are concentrated in Europe and North America. Over time, an even greater share of use is in Europe.

Three line charts and a map. They show how the majority of use is in North America and Europe, although normalized by population, Oceania prevails. At the same time, the spatial extent that is covered by Flickr photos has dropped.

A global map of Flickr users normalized by population. Many in Northern Europe, Spain, UK, North America and Australia & NZ.

(2) More of that remaining data is produced by the most active ‘super-users’ of Flickr – top 1 % of users uploaded about 1 / 3 of the photos!

An area chart and a line chart. They show that few users posts the majority of geolocated pictures and that this imbalance has grown over time (expressed through Gini index).

What did we find? (1) the popularity of Flickr has dropped significantly over the 13 year study period. Especially the number of active users has seemingly taken a nosedive.

A set of four line and bar graphs that show the number of uploads and active users of Flickr has dropped for over a decade.

We address this by describing the spatial and temporal patterns of 227M geolocated photos in 2010–2022 by ~1.5M users. We focus on why this matters when studying people’s recreational visits to nature

User-generated datasets that are only incidentally useful for research purposes have a problem: little is known about them. How many observations are there? Where are those observations? Who made them? Without these, we know little about the baggage and biases brought into subsequent analyses.

Flickr makes it easy to get geolocated data from anywhere. This has made it popular as a way to approximate people’s presence and preferences in research; think tourist movements, finding hotspots in a city, etc. not to mention that Flickr underlies many computer vision datasets and models.

Line and lollipop plots in one graph. Shows the fall in Flickr's popularity contrasted with the rise in publications using the data.

Tuomas Väisänen 📼🧟 @waeiski.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

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Reposted by Tatu Leppämäki

🚨🌍 NEW ARTICLE 🌍🚨 We geocoded the #mobility of over 2 million #Erasmus students across #Europe from 2014 to 2022 with @miladmzdh.bsky.social, Oula Inkeröinen & @ollejarv.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1038/s415... @mobi-twin-project.bsky.social @digigeolab.bsky.social @springernature.com #GIScience

Schematic of the workflow in the article. Leftmost panel shows a representation of the input data with high diversity in the types of place names resulting from typographical errors, character encoding errors, language-specific spellings and use of different scripts. The centre panel shows the general workflow from preprocessing to geocoding and finally to validation. The rightmost panel shows the spatially enriched Erasmus+ mobility data on a map with edge-bundled flows representing different intensities of student mobility across NUTS 3 regions in Europe.

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Reposted by Tatu Leppämäki

Digital Geography Lab @digigeolab.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Huge congratulations to our brilliant @ollejarv.bsky.social who has won the prestigious Research Council of Finland Award for his research on #CrossBorder #mobility! 🎉 A well-deserved award! 🎉🎉 blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-geog... #tutkimus #research #tiede #science #SuomenAkatemia #AcademyOfFinland

blogs.helsinki.fi

Olle Järv wins the prestigious Research Council of Finland Award – Digital Geography Lab blog

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Reposted by Tatu Leppämäki

Blender @blender.org · 03/03/2025

Congratulations to @gintszilbalodis.bsky.social and the entire Flow film crew for the Academy Award win! Flow is the manifestation of Blender’s mission, where a small independent team is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide. Thank you for the shout out! 🧡 #b3d

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Reposted by Tatu Leppämäki

tmonkey718 @tmonkey718.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

“Data doesn’t lie.” Spoken only by someone who has never worked with data in their life.

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Tatu Leppämäki @tadusko.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

The "Valeriepieris Circles", as they are named in this paper: doi.org/10.1111/gean... Iceland is a really extreme example, though.

Figure 1 from the linked paper. A map of Europe that shows the Valeriepieris circles for each country of Europe.