Visualising temporal changes in visitors’ areas of interest using online geotagged photographs

ABSTRACT Geotagged social media records can be used to capture the digital footprint of human spatial behaviour within a city. In particular, the photosharing service Flickr is useful for capturing the distribution of tourists' areas of interest (AOIs). The aim of this study is to visualise the spatial patterns in the AOIs of foreign visitors in central Tokyo. In particular, we paid special attention to how AOIs differ between visitors' home countries as well as how the distribution of the AOIs change. We selected Tokyo's top three major tourism sites (Shinjuku, Ginza, and Asakusa). Data used in this study was derived from geotagged photos on Flickr uploaded in 2014 and 2018. Among them, we collected photos taken within 1.5 km of three transportation stations located in the primary tourist sites. We chose 12,014 photos taken by visitors from Asian (excluding Japan) and European countries. Three types of maps (hot spot map, heat map, and difference map) were complementarily employed to visualise the visitor's different home countries and temporal changes between 2014 and 2018. To construct the hot spot map, point features were aggregated into a rectangular polygon with a 100-m grid square, and hot spot analysis was applied. The heat map was constructed using kernel density estimation. The difference map was employed to visualise the spatial pattern of the visitor's different home countries and any temporal changes between the examined years. The results show differences in the distribution of AOIs between visitors from Asia and Europe. This may reflect a cultural difference in the preference for tourism sites and travel behaviour as well as the amount of information available. Further, the distribution of AOIs changed between 2014 and 2018, which reflects environmental changes due to a redevelopment project.