Video on research work

The projects EVA-VGI and Privacy Aspects worked together during the second phase of the VGIscience priority programme VGIscience (coordinated by the Institute of Cartography at TU Dresden) in order to apply theoretical research results on user privacy to practical visual analytics examples. The background of this research and the motivation of participating colleagues is shown in a video, which we are happy to release to the public. The film features three of the researchers from the Institute of Cartography at the TU Dresden: Alexander Dunkel, Eva Hauthal and Marc Löchner.

Watch the video here.

As social media data reflects real-life information from people’s daily activities, it has become a popular source of information in research. This research usually does not focus on questions of (e.g.) advertising or user profiling, but on fundamental questions of society, particularly those that are connected with the increasing use of geo-social media, information spread, and associated environmental questions. During the two VGIscience phases, privacy became an increasingly relevant aspect for any project using social media data and VGI. Because people may not know that their data is being used for research purposes, the group has been working on methods to protect user privacy while still allowing researchers to analyze and visualize the data.