Livehoods: New York
“Our research hypothesis is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people that make it part of their daily life. To explore this idea, we use data from approximately 18 million check-ins collected from the location-based social network foursquare, and apply clustering algorithms to discover the different areas of the city.
We call the resulting areas Livehoods, reflecting the dynamic nature of activity patterns in the lives of city inhabitants. Like neighborhoods, Livehoods are a representation of the organizational structure of the city. However, Livehoods are different from neighborhoods. They give us an on-the-ground view of a city’s structure, helping us reconceptualize the dynamics of a city based on the way people actually use it.”

Visual mapping = awesome. There’s an intrepid-ness about this that I dig. I worked on something similar for work via Batchgeo and had fun with it.