Further restaurant Twitter mentions

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No. of restaurant Twitter mentions in last 30 days

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'On the Road' Reconfigured

While browsing the internet yesterday I stumbled upon another interesting project relating to Google Maps.

'On the Road for 17527 Miles' is a project made by a Berlin college student as part of a college thesis, and could be described as a modern day refiguring of Jack Kerouac's beat generation novel On The Road.

In an e-book, Gregor Weichbrodt has placed a long series of detailed directions from Google Maps, describing the journey that Kerouac takes step-by-step, and organised into four chapters, as in the book.

Click below to read the embedded e-book version...

Zoopla Property Price Maps

I've just come across yet another interesting heatmap as I was browsing property websites, as you do...
This time the heatmap is from Zoopla, the property search website, and shows the different prices of property in different parts of the country, with the highest priced areas being shown in red and the lowest areas in blue. 
The heatmap is a collaboration with Google Maps and also shows the average property price for each area. View it properly HERE.
Here are some snapshots...

I zoomed in to look more closely at London property prices, which not surprisingly showed up as the most expensive area in the UK.

If you click on each price sticker it gives you a more precise number for the average property price, as well as telling you the name of the area.

http://zoop.la/xcKiKV

57 Interesting World Maps

I came across this page called '57 maps that will challenge what you thought you knew about the world' on StumbleUpon.
There are some really interesting, as well as some really funny, map data visualisations that are worth checking out.
I've included some of my favourites below but it's really worth having a look at the page as they are all pretty good.

I also found this Yelp Worldmap which is a heat map showing the hipster density in New York which I found quite funny.

The map works by using data from reviews, so when calculating hipster density Yelp will have used reviews that mention the word 'hipster' and gone from there, pretty clever.

You can customise a map to see certain things, picking a city and then a thing that you'd like to see the density of in that city.

I chose London as my city and cocktails as my thing to see.

As well as being quite amusing and fun to play around with, Yelp Worldmap could actually be a pretty useful thing to use if you're looking for a certain thing and are not sure where to go.

More Google Street View Glitches

I was looking at the offices where I'm going to be doing my work placement next term on Google Street View and came across yet more amusing glitches.
I've got a three week work placement at the media agency Mindshare in London which I'm really excited about; they have a cool new office in the Central St Giles complex just off Tottenham Court Road, sharing the building with Google's offices which is quite exciting.
First of all, it seems that everyone had prepared for the Google Street View car to come round, those people dressed up are possibly Google employee's from the building, which would explain how they knew about the car coming.

I found it quite amusing that one guy had made himself a Google place marker sign to hold. When I first saw it I thought it was a real one and was very confused!

What's going on here?!

I didn't know that certain people's places had to be blurred out on Street View, or perhaps it's another glitch.

The effect is especially weird in the image below, with people's heads being all normal but then something strange happening to their bodies and legs...

Venngage

I've recently discovered this site called Venngage that lets you create your own data visualisations and graphs, either by using an already made template or by starting completely from scratch and making your own thing.
I decided to use my Brighton restaurant data from Tripadvisor and made a page of data visualisations from scratch. 
I don't think I'm able to embed the html of the page in this post but you can access it HERE.

I've included a screen grab of the graph so you can see what it looks like but without the interactive part which is quite important to the understanding of the data.

The pie chart is interactive; when you hover over each coloured slice it tells you what type of cuisine it is representing and how many restaurants of that cuisine there are in Brighton.

The '£' bubbles represent the different price brackets in relation to Brighton restaurants, and what percentage of restaurants fall under each price bracket. So, for example, most restaurants in Brighton are moderately cheap (represented by '££') and very expensive restaurants come in second (represented by '££££').

At the bottom of the page I've made a wordcloud consisting of the most popular dining options available for Brighton restaurants.

Please click on the link, or the first image, to be taken to the real graph so you can get a proper feel of it.

Google Street View Glitches

When I went on to street view on the Google Fusion map I'd made of the most visited restaurants in Brighton I saw some really weird (and cool) stuff. I seemed to find a lot more glitches than you'd usually find when looking on regular Google Maps.

I've screenshotted quite a few images, like the view of the South Lanes below, where images of people have gone really strange and appear blurred and ghost like. Aside from the main guy in the orange top you can also see another ghost like man to the far right of the image, really faint and almost like a shadow...

The same can be seen in the image below...

Something really strange has happened to that car on Prince Albert Street...

It's kind of like all the deformed images of airplanes you can find on Google Maps.

On top of all this I encountered an even weirder thing when I clicked on the exact location of one of the restaurants I had marked. Instead of taking me to a view of the street outside the restaurant Food For Friends, Google street view actually took me right inside the restaurant!

I have not heard of this happening before and didn't know it was possible as the Google street view car doesn't go inside buildings.

It felt very surreal to be virtually inside the restaurant (in a literal sense) and looking out onto the street, rather than the other way round...

Heatmap of Tripadvisor's Most Visited Restaurants

Unfortunately Google Fusion doesn't let you publish heatmaps for geocoded addresses, so instead I've taken screenshots of the effect, which you can see below.
The redder the heatspot, the more people have visited the place and left reviews on Tripadvisor.

It's cool how the further you zoom out, the more the heatspots blur into one...

Most Visited Restaurants in Brighton According to Tripadvisor

Click on the markers for photos and information about each of the restaurants, such as the name, how many reviews of the place there are on Tripadvisor, and its Tripadvisor ranking out of all the restaurants in Brighton (of which there are 797 in total).

Different proportion of cuisines in Brighton

Here I've made my own Data Visualisation graph, showing the proportion of all of the different cuisines in Brighton. I've got my data from Trip Advisor, so am relying on that for the accuracy of my data.
As you can see, apparently the cuisine with the most restaurants in Brighton is British cuisine, which is probably including pubs as there are a lot of pubs in Brighton!

Further Data Visualisation Example

The data visualisation below is a slight variation of the graph below.

It is using the same data - cocktail recipes - but displaying that data in a different form, that some people may or may not prefer.

I personally prefer the data visualisation in the previous post as I think it's more interesting to look at, but there are many different options with which to display data on Raw.

Data Visualisation Example Using 'Raw' App - Pretty Cool!

Problems...

I've just noticed an interesting occurrence on my blog. Ever since adding the posts with the Scribble Maps my blog seems to have stopped working properly. The sidebar is not showing up at the side on the homepage and any links on the page seem to have stopped working.
However, if you go onto one of the other pages listed along the top, such as 'Theory and Readings', everything is working fine there, meaning it is just the home page with all the regular blogposts on.
This is just slightly frustrating but I thought it's quite interesting as it's an example of a kind of glitch in the system. Perhaps Scribble Maps is too much for the page to handle and it's rejecting the maps by breaking my page!
I may have to create a whole separate page for the maps as I can't really have a blog that doesn't properly work...

Data Visualisation

This week I've been looking into the world of data visualisation.
Data visualisation is, as the name suggests, the digital visualisation of data, and is a way to represent data clearly and effectively (often in a creative way).
A website I've been looking at that has lots of interesting examples of different forms of data visualisation is Visual Complexity, which has examples ranging from things such as maps of locations on Foursquare to visual overviews of music albums (I've still no clue how that works but it does!)

Graph using locative devices - Visual Complexity

Graph visualising band Dead Kennedys' five studio albums - Visual Complexity

I find these examples of Visual Complexity really fascinating but at the moment have no idea how to go about making my own so need to really look into it!
There are some other good sites like We Love Datavis, which is a Tumblr site, that give further examples of what people have done, so I'm going to have more of a look and investigate this data visualisation business...