YANG SONG

Collaborator: Bo Zhang

 

Social media is a fast-growing area in built environment studies to understand public opinions and space usage. To bridge the use of these huge, efficient, and ever-growing data sets to landscape practice, this research marks a pilot effort to study site scale landscape issues using social media data. Taking the Seattle Freeway Park as an example, 3314 Instagram posts from 2035 users over three years (2015-2017) were mined and categorized to answer three research questions: 1) how is the Park used as a public space? 2) what are the users' emotional ties to the built environment of the Park? and 3) how should social media data be used to understand site-scale landscape architecture design issues? The results brought new perspectives and insights about public space design by discussing the associations between park usage and design strategies in lights of design features, publicity, and climate. An analytic procedure for analyzing and interpreting site-scale crowdsourcing data was developed, which is valuable to landscape design and management, as well as the knowledge expansion of this discipline.