Check-In: Foursquare and the Rich Annotated Topology of Citizen-Generated Hyperlocal Data

Over the last few years, a new resource has emerged for studying the evolution of specific cities. That resource is urban annotation: the attachment of comments to places so that they can later be accessed by others in that same location via smartphone. The city guide app Foursquare is the prime example of this. Barcelona-based curator and cultural researcher José Luis de Vicente examines the app from its origins to the types of data it generates, considering its implications and its surprisingly accurate predictive potentials.