Phone Call Cartography
THE M.I.T. SENSEable City Lab has once again put together some beautiful spatial data visualizations – this time it is a project about seeing how Americans interconnect through mobile phones.
“If you analyze aggregated cellphone traffic, interesting patterns emerge. Cities become connective hubs as people move to them from nearby counties and from far across the country. As a result, many calls originate and end in cities, connecting urban citizens to their families back home. At the same time, communities emerge that have little to do with geographic boundaries. While some follow state lines, others split states in half or combine them…. These patterns show that proximity is only one of many factors — both cultural and economic — that bring people together.” From the New York Times article 7/3/11 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/sunday-review/03phone-map.html
Watch the video they have put together on the research (1 Minute long)
This is the link to an interactive map that allows you to plug in your own location and see the mobile phone traffic.
Check out their website for other projects they are working on. There is a particularly nice project on Singapore, complete with some very cool data visualizations about the city’s local transportation network, urban heat island, the effects of being the “hub of the world,” the world’s largest trans-shipment container port and one of the busiest airports in the world, among other topics. Singapore is such a unique place, being one of the world's last city-sates.
“As vehicular traffic opens up and jams in the course of the day, the time we need to move in Singapore shrinks and expands. How long will it take you to go from home to any other destination? Find out with this isochronic map, where the deformations are proportional to travel time - and reveals the changes in the course of a weekend/week day.” From M.I.T. SENSEable City Lab website
Check out the video and other visualizations at: