Imagine traveling through a strange city… Inside your mind, subconscious judgements about your surroundings are made in real time. Do you feel safe? Does the area you are in seem unique? Does it appear wealthy, clean or even energetic? You may not think about, let alone understand, what goes into making these anecdotal determinations, but when elicited, your opinions can be understood as part of a more substantial collective and used in powerful ways.
Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run a perception study and visualize the results in powerful ways. Developed at the MIT Media Lab by the Macro Connections group, Place Pulse crowdsources surveys to internet participants, asking binary perception questions across a large number of geotagged images. From the responses of each participant, directed graphs are generated, which are then layered with the graphs of others, forming what we call a perception network. This perception network can be analyzed and visualized in a multitude of ways, allowing the experimenter to identify interesting patterns in the data, possibly forming the basis for a future hypothesis. Check it out.