Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content

Posted: October 25th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

The methods and tools I have developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab to explore the significance of the new types of user-related spatiotemporal data have been published in the current issue of the IEEE Pervasive Magazine. In Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content I describe how our approach helps uncover the presence and movements of tourists from cell phone network data and the georeferenced photos they generate.

Girardin, F., Calabrese, F., Dal Fiore, F. , Ratti, C., and Blat, J. (2008). Digital footprinting: Uncovering tourists with user-generated content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(4):36–43.

Relation to my thesis: A follow-up work of the case study in Florence. In this paper I explain how different types of digital footprints visitors leave behind when visiting Rome, capture their presence at different places and moments. While, the analysis of georeference photos help define sightseeing areas, mapping the aggregated cellular network activity originated from foreign mobile phones reveal places of travel (train station) and lodging
(hotel areas).

Mapping tourist activities from the digital footprints they generate
Geovisualizations of the presence of (a) 932 tourist photographers and (b) 520,000 phone calls from foreign mobile phones in the Coliseum and Piazza della Repubblica area from September to November 2006. Both types of data cover the train station area in the proximity of the Piazza della Republica. The values in each cell are normalized.

6 Comments on “Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content”

  1. 1 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » Framing my PhD Dissertation said at 4:35 pm on October 26th, 2008:

    [...] Services) and the analysis of digital shadows and their correlation with digital footprints in Digital footprinting: uncovering the presence and movements of tourists from user-generated content that reveals the complementary perspectives of each data set. Other data analysis techniques on [...]

  2. 2 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » So Long Boston! said at 5:35 pm on December 5th, 2008:

    [...] the publication of a paper in IEEE Pervasive magazine [...]

  3. 3 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » The End of Timelessness said at 12:43 am on April 11th, 2009:

    [...] describe as the Long Here, is mainly exposed in my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and related. The observations of the presence of the hard infrastructures that deny the Long Here took place [...]

  4. 4 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » What Can Be Gained From This Data? said at 9:34 am on June 9th, 2009:

    [...] developed for the study of the Waterfalls was important to move beyond the pure descriptive work on Rome and Florence. After gaining a first understanding of the characteristics of the data, the current [...]

  5. 5 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » Exploiting the Bluetooth Spectrum as Material for Space Management Strategies said at 8:49 pm on March 17th, 2010:

    [...] of a Pervasive Game (CatchBob!), processing GSM fingerprints to perform air-travel detection, analyzing georeferenced photos and aggregated cellular network traffic to develop attractiveness indicators or webscrapping [...]

  6. 6 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » Geneva From its Social Network Activities said at 1:11 am on May 5th, 2010:

    [...] we have been engaged to produce techniques and prototypes for city governments (City of New York, Province of Florence), mobility service and infrastructure providers (Boeing, BitCarrier), mobile service providers [...]