ABSTRACT
Modern writers, painters, photographers, filmmakers and digital artists have created many fascinating representations of city life. Paintings of Parisian boulevards and cafés by Pissarro and Renoir, photomontages by Berlin Dada artists, Spider-Man comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Broadway Boogie-Woogie by Piet Mondrian and Playtime by Jacques Tati are some of the classic examples of artists encountering the city. Today, a city ‘talks’ to us in data. Many cities make data sets available and sponsor hackathons to encourage the creation of useful apps using their data. For example, the NYC Open Data website, sponsored by the NYC Mayor’s Office, offers over 1,200 data sets covering everything from the trees in the city to bike data. On top of that, locals and tourists share massive amounts of geo-coded visual media using Twitter, Instagram and other networks. Services such as Foursquare tell us where people go and what kind of venues they frequent. At the start of a new Cultural Analytics project, Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur and Lev Manovich 1 asked themselves the following questions: How can we represent the 21st century using such rich data and image sources? Is there a different way to visualize the city besides graphs, numbers or maps?
