Interactive Map Pinpoints Where in NYC Tourists Flock (and Locals Avoid)

February 23, 2015

If you’re a New Yorker who grumbles at the sight of slowpoke tourists lollygagging down Manhattan’s crowded streets, you’ll want to see this map created by data artist Eric Fischer called “Locals & Tourists.” Fischer collected tweets from across the five boroughs (and beyond) to determine what areas were most concentrated with out-of-towners (the red) and what areas were dominated by locals (the blue).

Fischer used Gnip‘s archive of geo-tagged tweets from September 2011 through May 2013 to to plot the map. He pinned those who’d been tweeting from the same area for a month or more as “locals,” while tweeters new to the scene with less than a month’s presence were determined to be “tourists.”

 Eric Fischer Tourist and Locals Map

The map unfortunately isn’t overlaid onto a road map, which makes it hard to determine exactly where each tweet is coming from when you zoom in tight. But a GPS of sorts in the bottom left corner (activated by your cursor) gives you a pretty good idea of the neighborhood you’re looking at. Fischer says that this map is “more representative of a broader slice of life and of local neighborhood concentrations” than of individual streets or short stretches.

The data maps also cover numerous global cities, London, Istanbul and Paris amongst them. See where to find foreign folks and new local friends using the map here.

[Via CityLab]

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Lead image via Eric Fischer’s flickr

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