Tourists Versus Locals, Mapping Who Visits Where in Dallas

Artist Eric Fischer created maps using data to show where locals go, and where tourists head. This is a close up of his Dallas map – a larger, interactive image in the story (Photo courtesy Flickr/Eric Fischer)

From staff reports

Early this week, an interesting article popped up in our inbox — a post in Arch Daily that highlighted the data-driven map artwork of Eric Fischer, who has created maps that show where the locals go in any given city, versus where the tourists go.

“Artist Eric Fischer has developed a project that explores precisely the difference in perceiving — and photographing —a city from the point of view of tourists and locals,” the post said. “The work, which is entitled Locals and Tourists, gathers the maps of 136 of the largest — and most visited — cities in the world.”

Using MapBox and Twitter data compiled between 2010 and 2013, Fischer created visualizations of where tourists (the red dots) and locals (the blue dots) took pictures.

He (so far) has mapped 136 of the largest and most visited cities in the world, including Dallas (which is below). Austin, Houston, and San Antonio are also included in his cache of maps.

“For this research, people who have been tweeting from the same city continuously within one month were considered locals,” the post explained. “Meanwhile, tourists meant those who were considered locals in a city and tweeted from another location.”

To see more of Fischer’s work, click here. To see more of the maps in Locals and Tourists, click here. To see the Arch Daily post, click here.