Exploring the Typographical Landscape of New York City
Exploring New York City's Linguistic Landscape with The Pudding's Visualization Map
In a fascinating exploration of the city's urban environment, The Pudding has created a visualization map that showcases the distribution of words in New York City's physical landscape. This groundbreaking project uses data from NYC-based media artist Yufeng Zhao, who fed over 8 million Google Street View images into an AI system.
The AI system, in turn, automatically extracted more than 130 million snippets of visible text from various sources such as storefronts, street signs, and graffiti across the city. This data was then used to create a searchable map, displaying where specific words or phrases appear geographically on buildings, sidewalks, and infrastructure.
The map is a unique tool for understanding the linguistic landscape of New York City, providing insights into the distribution of various phrases in the city's urban environment. For instance, the Spanish word iglesia (church) shows clear clusters in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods like Bushwick and Sunset Park.
This visualization reveals patterns tied to culture, commerce, and community in New York City. By linking linguistic data from the urban environment directly to NYC’s geography, the map demonstrates how language usage varies across the city’s diverse neighborhoods based on the visible words captured by the AI on Street View images.
To explore this fascinating project, visit The Pudding's visualization map. It's a captivating journey through the city's "textscape", shedding light on the rich tapestry of languages that make up New York City's vibrant cultural landscape.
[1]: The Pudding's visualization map can be explored at https://pudding.cool/2021/05/nyc-words/ [2]: The map provides insights into the distribution of various phrases in the city's urban environment. [4]: The word "iglesia" (Spanish for church) showed clear clusters in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods like Bushwick and Sunset Park.
AI technology played a significant role in the extraction of data from various sources within the urban environment of New York City for this project. The data-and-cloud-computing system used in this endeavor processed over 130 million snippets of visible text, including data from home-and-garden signs, storefronts, street signs, graffiti, and more. This data was then applied to create the visualization map, which illustrates the distribution of various words or phrases geographically within the city. Besides Spanish phrases such as "iglesia," users can also find diverse phrases related to other aspects of the city's lifestyle, like technology terms or shops, in this AI-driven textual landscape.
