St. Petersburg Tags II

CODE: GitHub
DATATYPE: tag score histograms
SOURCE: Instagram, Google Cloud Vision
PLACE: St. Petersburg
YEARS: 2014-2015
SIZE: 584 tags
VIZTYPE: map
FEATURES: tag space
FEAT SRC: Google Cloud Vision
ORIG FEAT DIMS: 5
EMBEDDING: t-SNE
BINS: 45
GRIDDING: fill
CRITERION: adjacency
ANNOTATIONS: tag label
PROJECT: St. Petersburg Instagram

This is a "map" visualization, meaning that the images are plotted in a coordinate space — here, a 2D t-SNE embedding of a 5-dimensional "histogram space", derived from Google's Cloud Vision API. When you make a tag request for an image, Google returns a list of tags, each with a confidence score. The higher the score, the surer Google's classifiers are that the tag applies to the image. The plot here uses as its plot elements (and its feature space) something I call a "histogram line": a line that connects the tops of histogram columns, to simplify its visual representation. These are fairly simple 5-bin histograms, each bin representing a range of possible tag scores (they range from 0.5 to 1). These 5-dimensional vectors sit, therefore, in a 5-dimensional similarity space. The map here groups together tags that have similar confidence profiles.