Mapping historic urban landscape values through social media

Abstract

Social media provides big data for researchers to perform real-time analytics, as digital ethnographers, on what places and attributes people value in the historic urban landscapes they live or visit, enough to share with their social network. However, the use of these data to further our knowledge on heritage and their values, or to support heritage planning and management is still very limited. This article proposes a methodology for the analysis of viewpoints locationview scenes-tags data for photos posted on Flickr to provide insights into all facets of the perceived landscape character that identifies people-centered heritage at the city level. The analysis visualizes convergence and divergence between locals' and tourists' preferences. It also reveals heritage concerns in the context of daily-life practices and everyday landscape, as well as political and religious concerns in post-conflict areas. Additionally, the analysis questions the limits of heritage areas and categories used for identifying cultural values. Results showed that the different analyses complement one another to eventually provide insights into everyday encounters with the historic urban landscape. They also show the difference between experts' and users' documentation and characterization languages when defining heritage. When the first apply domain-specific classification models, the latter express personal reflections without following a specific hierarchy or a closed categorical system. It is believed that the outcome can help heritage scholars to further our understanding for the diversity of heritage places and attributes, as well as, heritage professionals, to inform decision-making processes in heritage planning and management on both experts' and users' understanding of heritage.

The Historic Urban Landscape approach to urban management: a systematic review

“…In the last two decades, remote sensing technologies, ground and aerial technologies, and GIS-based models have successfully been applied to several cultural heritage applications, and they have been considered as ideal tools for analyzing spatial data for the management of knowledge on cultural heritage and for supporting decision-making(Rinaudo, Agosto, and Ardissone 2007;Robinson et al 2010;Agapiou et al 2015). Moreover, in recent years, crowdsourcing and social media metadata have been recognized by many cultural heritage institutions and scholars as tools for participatory heritage praxis that would allow a variety of encounters and a cross-dialogue between different stakeholders, as they provide community-based platform for communicating users' interaction with cultural heritage(Terras 2011;Giaccardi 2012;Ole and Smith 2012;Liew 2014;Ginzarly, Pereira Roders, and Teller Forthcoming).There is an agreement among scholars in the corpus about the four pillars of sustainable development: environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability. Nevertheless, sustainability is used by most scholars as a concept.…”

Describing, comparing and analysing digital urban heritage tools: A methodology designed with a multidisciplinary approach

“…Noordegraaf et al (2014) compare and evaluate crowdsourcing platforms developed by heritage institutions. Ginzarly et al (2018) analyse photos on Flickr to identify the way in which users (residents and tourists) perceive heritage at the city scale. These methods have the advantage of offering relevant approaches, criteria and indicators.…”

“…These methods have the advantage of offering relevant approaches, criteria and indicators. However, they are focused on types of tools that are more specific than those we want to analyse: participatory urban planning (Alatalo et al 2017;Münster et al 2017), web-mapping (Farkas 2017), crowdsourcing (Carletti et al 2013;Noordegraaf et al 2014), digital tools for citizen heritage (Lewi et al 2016), 3D reconstitution (Münster et al 2016) and urban landscapes (Ginzarly et al 2018). Moreover, these methods often stem from the questioning of a single discipline, whereas, following the recommendations of Münster et al (2016), a multidisciplinary approach is needed in order to offer a more comprehensive analysis.…”

Using Social Media as a Source for Understanding Public Perceptions of Archaeology: Research Challenges and Methodological Pitfalls

“…Although similar methods are attracting interest in the wider field of the digital humanities, of which archaeology is undoubtedly a part, only a 'select few researchers are in a position to truly reap the benefits of big social data analysis' (Zelenkauskaite & Bucy 2016). A handful of scholars working in the field of heritage and archaeology have made forays into the use of these computational techniques, and a number of empirical papers have been published (for example: Altaweel 2019; Bonacchi, Altaweel & Krzyzanska 2018;Cunliffe & Curini 2018;Ginzarly, Roders & Teller 2019;Greenland et al 2019;Huffer & Graham 2017;Huffer & Graham 2018;Oteros-Rozas et al 2018;Zuanni 2017).…”