From sunrise to sunset: Exploring landscape preference through global reactions to ephemeral events captured in georeferenced social media

Abstract

Events profoundly influence human-environment interactions. Through repetition, some events manifest and amplify collective behavioral traits, which significantly affects landscapes and their use, meaning, and value. However, the majority of research on reaction to events focuses on case studies, based on spatial subsets of data. This makes it difficult to put observations into context and to isolate sources of noise or bias found in data. As a result, inclusion of perceived aesthetic values, for example, in cultural ecosystem services, as a means to protect and develop landscapes, remains problematic. In this work, we focus on human behavior worldwide by exploring global reactions to sunset and sunrise using two datasets collected from Instagram and Flickr. By focusing on the consistency and reproducibility of results across these datasets, our goal is to contribute to the development of more robust methods for identifying landscape preference using geo-social media data, while also exploring motivations for photographing these particular events. Based on a four facet context model, reactions to sunset and sunrise are explored for Where, Who, What, and When. We further compare reactions across different groups, with the aim of quantifying differences in behavior and information spread. Our results suggest that a balanced assessment of landscape preference across different regions and datasets is possible, which strengthens representativity and exploring the How and Why in particular event contexts. The process of analysis is fully documented, allowing transparent replication and adoption to other events or datasets.

Volunteered Geographic Information

“…In addition to these core challenges, protecting user privacy is becoming increasingly important when working with user-generated content (danah boyd and Crawford 2012). For this reason, Dunkel et al (2023a) sought to develop a robust and transferable "workflow template," for assessing human activities and subjective landscape values through geosocial media worldwide-without compromising user privacy.…”

“…The consistent global and long-term footprint of the sunset and sunrise offered an opportunity to maximize the sample size while also providing a basis for reproducing the results using two datasets, albeit not universally representative but independent, collected from Instagram and Flickr. Despite the narrow topic of this study, the shared expected frequencies (e.g., Flickr 300 million post counts dataset for a .100 × 100 km grid, Dunkel et al 2023b) can also be very useful for calculating chi in studies of other phenomena at global scales, for differently sampled data, e.g., based on a different set of search terms.…”

“…Finally, the use of abstracted, estimated, non-personal data based on HyperLogLog, as suggested by a scoping study , was a practically feasible solution that supports a shift toward privacypreserving and ethically aware data analysis in human preference research. The analysis process and anonymized data are made available in a repository, allowing transparent verification, replication, and transfer to other events or datasets (data repository; Dunkel et al 2023b).…”