Cultural Analytics
Developed at UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute, the GeoMedia Analytics Platform combines Google Earth, Google Maps, and Street View APIs to investigate large public cultural datasets. A core study mapped geo-tagged social-media photos along Park Ave in New York City, synchronizing spatial and temporal views so users could activate image pins and watch patterns emerge by neighborhood, corridor, and time of day.
Another major thread analyzed the visual language of popular culural phenemona like the Star Wars franchise as large image sets, using the same comparative workflow to track recurring motifs, color signatures, and scene composition at scale. Together, these projects positioned cultural analytics as a bridge between computational methods and media interpretation.
The interface was built in JavaScript and designed to scale from laptop screens to Qualcomm Institute's super high resolution tiled display environments. Filtering by date, user, and location enabled close reading of everyday cultural signals including mobility, gathering, food, and street-level visual behavior across different parts of the city.
About Todd
My research represents a formal inquiry into the friction between users and data. By architecting novel hardware and algorithms, these projects establish new benchmarks for how we visualize and interact with massive, multi-dimensional datasets.
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