title: Quantifying International Travel Flows Using Flickr.
abstract: Online social media platforms are opening up new opportunities to analyse human behaviour on an unprecedented scale. In some cases, the fast, cheap measurements of human behaviour gained from these platforms may offer an alternative to gathering such measurements using traditional, time consuming and expensive surveys. Here, we use geotagged photographs uploaded to the photo-sharing website Flickr to quantify international travel flows, by extracting the location of users and inferring trajectories to track their movement across time. We find that Flickr based estimates of the number of visitors to the United Kingdom significantly correlate with the official estimates released by the UK Office for National Statistics, for 28 countries for which official estimates are calculated. Our findings underline the potential for indicators of key aspects of human behaviour, such as mobility, to be generated from data attached to the vast volumes of photographs posted online.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Barchiesi
authors.affiliation: Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Helen Susannah
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Moat
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Alis
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bishop
authors.affiliation: Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Preis
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D020407:Internet; D010781:Photography; D012984:Software; D014195:Travel