Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Place Through User-Generated Content: Using Flickr Tags To Describe City Cores, Livia Hollenstein, Ross Purves

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Terms used to describe city centers, such as Downtown, are key concepts in everyday or vernacular language. Here, we explore such language by harvesting georeferenced and tagged metadata associated with 8 million Flickr images and thus consider how large numbers of people name city core areas. The nature of errors and imprecision in tagging and georeferencing are quantified, and automatically generated precision measures appear to mirror errors in the positioning of images. Users seek to ascribe appropriate semantics to images, though bulk-uploading and bulk-tagging may introduce bias. Between 0.5--2% of tags associated with georeferenced images analyzed describe city core areas …