Cell City: Visualizing Mexico's Cell Phone Data

In partnership with Telefonica, the third largest cell phone company in the world and the primary cell phone company in Mexico City, we will explore what cell phone data can tell us about Mexico City and the behaviors of its inhabitants’. This will be done by experimenting with the data to create visualizations that tell compelling stories and provide new vantage points to understand the city and the data itself. The class will focus on creating compelling visuals that highlight patterns that might not have otherwise been seen in the city, thereby highlighting new vantage points of the data.

Cell phones and the networks they run on have become ubiquitous personal computing devices that help us navigate and interact with the city. We use our mobile devices for almost everything that we do from talking on the phone, navigating the city, personal banking, email, and surfing the web. As we interact with these devices we leaves bits of information about what we are doing at the location we are performing them. Visualizing and analyzing this data holds much potential for developing new viewpoints, understandings, services and opportunities for the cities we live in.

Cell phone data mapping is useful for all kinds of urban reasons, from the everyday, in projects like CitySense which can help people and advertisers alike understand the most popular locations for post-work bar hopping, to complex urban research on patterns of movement, transnational interactions, and understanding how we connect to place. Ratti and Williams (2005) studied Vodafone data in Milan to show that cell phones could help to improve transportation networks and provide emergency assistance during natural disasters. Recently Reades (2007) has shown how phone records can be used to highlight areas in the UK that are connected with each other, allowing previously unnoticed patterns and linkages to be investigated. Rojas (2010) has examined ways in which cell phone data can be used to understand the connections between immigrant communities and their countries of origin. These "big data" sets can help unearth patterns that might not have otherwise been visible.