Flickr, data and the historic built environment

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

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What happens if you mix the geo-data embedded in photos with some data about where our listed buildings are in London?

This:

Higher graded buildings were more likely to have photographs taken near them: 88% of Grade Is had at least one photograph falling within 25m of their centre (as defined by the coordinates given in their list description) as opposed to 76% of Grade II*s and 61% of Grade IIs).

The average number of photographs for those that had photographs within this distance was also highest for Grade Is (168 photographs on average), followed by Grade II*s (58) and Grade IIs (42).

Some interesting work from John Davies at Nesta, using the Flickr API. Just proving what’s intuiting, perhaps, but a nice illustration of how you can use a big public dataset like Flickr to test assumptions.

APIsbuilt environmentdatadata journalismflickrlisted buildings

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Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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