While browsing the web for inspiration for this project, I came across this text that said: “[...] mapping is more about representation than truthfulness[...]“. This made me wonder about the nature of maps and how they could become “real” representations.
Thus came the project “Montreal is…”. Cities are usually mapped according to their physical attributes (geological, transportation, etc.), while I find that what really represents a place is what the people make it out to be. But how do you map feelings of an individual, or of an entire population, without rendering everything to statistic and number?
I decided that the best way was to use the tools of social networking to my advantage. With the advent of sites like Twitter, it is easy to find out how people feel about certain things at a current time. “Montreal is…” makes use of this site and generates a “map” of Montreal according to a small number of people.
Technicalities: I used PHP to search the Twitter API and find the last few entries that mention: “montreal is”. Afterward, I created a code that checks keywords inside the results and, if a keyword is found, the background will change accordingly. For example, if someone mentions that Montreal is sunny, the image posted in the background should be of a sunny Montreal (unless the code finds more than one keyword in the results, in which case only the most recent post will be taken in account). I wanted to push the project a little further and use the Flickr API, but, alas, copyright and search relevance issues made it impossible. So, Instead, I decided to use a few images I had access to.
With more time to develop the project, I would like to calculate how many people have found Montreal “cold” or “beautiful” (and so on) within a time frame and display it. I would also like to make the images in the background more relevant and of better quality for the project.