The Exploration of "Place"-The Web Albums Approach
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Hsu, Yu-Ling
Abstract
In the past, regional geographers used to think region as a “container”, and regional research had been simplified as the description of place. Therefore, new regional geographers embedded human activities and place cognition into the definition of the spatial relationship and the process of place’s construction. Recently, however, most of the new regional geographical studies focus on theories and constructs, neglecting the basic issue of boundaries problems and the process of region’s construction. This paper tries to use the analysis of geotags to solve the problem of issue. Recently web-techniques allow worldwide users to upload and share their photos, and the users can put photos’ geotags (photos’ descriptions and predefined geographic coordinates) onto public cyberspaces. Studies have considered that a collection of geotags not only reflects people’s “spatial cognition”, but also involves the concept of “collective intelligence”, which is helpful to meaningfully define physical boundaries for places. The challenge to delineate those physical boundaries is the complication of geotags’ topology in geographic extent. This study integrated Alpha Shape, an algorithm for topological analysis, and web-photos to delineate the boundary of a place. The test was performed by collecting web-photos and geotags of a custom name, “Gongguan”, through internet. In addition, Network analysis was also applied to extract local-characteristics of Gongguan based on a set of predefined attribute categories. The result shows that the boundary of Gongguan can be successfully generated by integrating Alpha Shape and collecting geotags through calibration of Alpha Shape, and most frequently identified attributes are food, NTU…etc. However, derived boundaries and attributes vary with time, such as day and night. This study provides an approach to explore the identity of a place and its dynamics of spatial cognition and interaction with local-characteristics in time and space, and it also provides the new regional geography to integrate the regional and spatial analyses.
Subjects
New regional geography
network analysis
geotag
collective intelligence
Type
thesis
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