NYC twitter map of languages

This GIS/social media relationship rocks my socks off. Researchers at Fast.co recently turned 8.5 million tweets into an interactive map of languages in NYC. As they explain:

You can walk the streets of New York City and hear a veritable babel of languages. It’s estimated that as many as 800 languages are spoken around the city. A new mapping project takes a look at which ones are the most spoken on social media.

Five percent of tweets were in languages other than English, with Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and French Creole topping the list. These are not the same top languages spoken by New Yorkers, respectively, which raises the interesting question of why not? Are some NYC language groups less inclined to use Twitter? Can the discrepancy be explained by exogenous factors like poverty or internet access? Or does everyone just tweet in English?

Mapping locals and tourists by photo tags

I have been following San Francisco's own "digital cartographer" Eric Fischer for awhile now, so I'm a bit surprised that I just found this set on his Flickr photostream. In 2010 Fischer presented a series of maps that documented the intensity of geo-tagged photography in over a hundred metro regions around the world. In his updated set he breaks this information down a bit further, into 'tourists' and 'locals' - users/photographers that uploaded multiple photos of the area more than a months apart.

The project was initially an effort to see if the earlier Geotaggers' World Atlas maps were primarily sourced by tourist photography, but the product became a veritable GIS map comparing trending tourist activity to areas where local residents spend their time.

Washington, District of Columbia

Home designs for humanitarian crises, or "What do IDPs and hipsters have in common?"

A friend at school asked for a book suggestion last December as part of her effort to find the perfect Christmas present for her architecture and development inclined SO. By chance, I actually had a book on hand for exactly this situation! Architecture for Humanity collected information on dozens of innovative, low-cost, "sustainable" designs for habitable structures back in 2006 and featured them in a handbook called Design Like You Give a Damn.

Someone had bought it, presumably used it, and discarded it at the end of my freshman year of college at Santa Clara. After haggling with the book-nazi in the basement of our student center (not the nice gray-haired woman, the other old guy that didn't smile) to sell back my calculus text for more than $10 - and failing - I found this gem on the FREE table. It was brilliant. I read the book cover to cover and shared it with a few people, and I wound up working on our school's Solar Decathlon team the next year because I thought the whole idea was so nifty. After suggesting the book I read through it again, and I've been following their work for the past few months.

Sunset over P Street

Thanks to mazzbazzle for this image (r/washingtondc)