Tourists vs. locals: mapping urban traces from social media

Abstract

Nowadays, the traces of humans are left all over the social media. Massive volunteered geographic information (VGI) contributed by social media users offers great opportunities to create new methods of understanding human activities.The generation and analysis of the digital footprints on social media have the potential to uncover the interesting spatial-temporal patters of how people interact with outer environment differently. The study provides an approach to differentiate the urban traces left by tourists from diverse origin countries and local citizens as different user groups based on the VGI obtained from a social media platform Flickr. Kernel denstiy estimation was used to analyze the distribution of Flickr photos. As a result, it has been proved that it is possible to map the urban traces of tourists and locals from social media data. In addition, the approach is useful to deduce the spatial-temporal characteristics, vague region definition, and the thematic interests of local citizens and tourists from different origins.