In Search of Authenticity

Gentrification threatens Chinatowns across the US, and in the process, the authenticity of the cultural heritage of Chinatown may be lost. The “authenticity” is subjective to the individual’s personal experience and background.

Social media photos record the beautiful or unique scenes of a city and present the subjective view of a place, and provide an opportunity for us to investigate the cultural landscape of cities.

Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million (YFCC100m) dataset contains a list of photos and videos. This is the largest publicly and freely useable multimedia collection, containing the metadata of around 99.2 million photos and 0.8 million videos from Flickr.

Let's zoom into San Francisco.

The boundaries of the San Francisco Chinatown remain undefined, which poses a technical challenge for this research. Considering different definitions of SF Chinatown, the distribution of Chinese commerce and the Asian population, a bounding box enclosed by Green Street, Mason Street, Sutter Street, and Sansome Street was defined as the study area.

Photos are grouped into 6 perception categories. The 'Chinese Culture' category is composed of photos that are related to Chinese traditional festivals, food, art, business and activities. 

Perception Map

Townscape. Photos belonging to this class are distributed all over the study area. Compared to locals, photos taken by tourists are more concentrated in several streets, i.e. Grant Avenue.

Landmark. As expected, the majority of pictures belonging to this class are found near Dragon Gate, Transamerica Pyramid, etc.

Business & Socializing. For locals, the distribution of the two categories is similar.

Art. Photos belonging to this class distribute with some highest density points. There is little difference between locals and tourists.

The authentic Chinatown area? To some extent, the distribution of photos belonging to "Chinese Culture" class represents the "real" Chinatown area. Locals percept a larger area than tourists. Besides, tourists' perceptions are more concentrated in the main street, whereas locals take photos in some small alleys. The social media data volume is huge. However, we should be aware of the people who could not be reached using social media data, such as elders and other financially or even socially marginalized groups.

The current categorization and labeling are all based on my personal view. I was born and raised in China for 20+ years and have never been to any Chinatown.

Proposed interactive visualization: This visualization displays the data of one random Flickr user's posting activities in San Francisco Chinatown on a single day between 2005 and 2014. See the location and perception content of the photo, as well as the distribution of photos within 24 hours.

General Info. On the left column, we can see the clock, legend, and perception proportion, or load another user. Timeline. On the bottom column, we can explore how many and what kinds of photos he/she took over 24 hours. Image. Click a point in the map, we can explore the original image taken in this location. Main Map. The map will show the spatiotemporal route of the user's photo taken activities in Chinatown.

（Similar to offline interview survey）