Take a spin through Google Maps – that democratizing, interconnecting beast – and one thing is immediately apparent: no people. Well there are people, they just lack faces. (See: Lost Ark, Raiders of the)
Now some brainiacs at Rutgers are trying to fix that. According to The Atlantic:
But what Google delivers in breadth, it loses in depth. The nature of the car camera technology means that all we see are exteriors passed by. Faces are blurred. We don’t really see people living their lives, so much as the backdrop against which they do so.
Which is what makes The Beat, a new project from the Rutgers Social Media Information Lab, so interesting. It mashes up geolocated, hashtagged Instagram photos with the Google Street View locations from which they were posed. In doing so, it provides the human foreground for these locations.
I took it for a whirl through Dallas this morning, and found the above screenshot. And the below screenshot. Try it for yourself, using #Dallas in the search box at the top. Here are the #Dallas results.
