Bike Exploration Animations
A series of artistic animations that visualize biking activity across cities.
Here, I created a series of artistic animations that visualize my biking activity in cities I have lived in (Gothenburg, Sweden; Denver, Colorado; and Boston, Massachusetts).
After encountering a similar visualization more than four years ago, I started recording my bike rides using the Strava app, planning to make these animations. I even found myself deliberately avoiding obvious routes to ensure the fullness of my future maps.
Visualizations like these can motivate people to explore by bike – seeing that animation years ago clearly had that effect on me. A more typical (and informative) map would show routes drawn onto a base map, but this more abstract representation emphasizes discovery. There is no world outside of what you uncover through biking. The use of animation (as opposed to, for example, a heatmap of all routes) also emphasizes the idea of discovery. You have to lay down the routes one by one, day by day, slowly revealing the city. It is a process.
I intend to expand the project into a toolkit that allows others to make their own animations.
- Tools and technologies: Python, GeoPandas, Jupyter Notebooks, QGIS, ffmpeg, GPX.
- Skills showcase: (Geospatial) data cleaning, manipulation, and analysis pipeline; problem-solving with weird data formats; artistic visualization; and animation.