# ON BROADWAY

_What can data tell us about a single street?_

Published: 2014-12-07

Live project: [http://on-broadway.nyc](http://on-broadway.nyc)

This interactive installation represents life in the 21st-century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan. The result is a new type of city view, created from the activities of hundreds of thousands of people.

## Key visuals

- Full On Broadway interface with stacked data layers spanning Manhattan from Financial District to Inwood
- Person touching the large interactive screen to explore a grid of Instagram photos from a Broadway block
- Interface zoomed to Midtown, showing street-view facades, colors and taxi and social-media statistics per block
- Interface zoomed to Times Square, with per-block street views and taxi, Twitter and Instagram figures
- Grid of Instagram photos from the Upper West Side, including Central Park, food and the Columbus Circle globe
- Visitor viewing the On Broadway installation and its Manhattan map at an exhibition in Seoul

![Six vertical data spines along Broadway comparing household income, taxi rides, Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter activity]()

On Broadway enables seamless navigation between high-level condensed views of the city and zoomed in, anecdotal data. In the exploratory phase of the project, we experimented a lot with different remixes and montages of the many data and image materials we had available. The final application reflects this enormous data diversity and richness: from taxi rides and median income to color palettes and Twitter messages.

The project proposes a new visual metaphor for thinking about the city: a vertical stack of image and data layers. There are 13 such layers in the project, all aligned to locations along Broadway. As you move along the street, you see a selection of Instagram photos from each area, left, right, and top Google Street View images and extracted top colors from these image sources. We also show average numbers of taxi pickups and drop-offs, Twitter posts with images, and average family income for the parts of the city crossed by Broadway. To help with navigation, we added additional layers showing names of Manhattan neighborhoods crossed by Broadway, cross-streets and landmarks.

![Diagram labeling the stacked image and data layers of the On Broadway interface, from street-view facades to neighborhoods]()

## Bonus material

This video montage presents a full walkthrough of broadway from south to north, based on Google Street View image material.

## Credits

Produced in collaboration with Lev Manovich, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer, Daniel Mehrdad et al.

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[View on truth-and-beauty.net](https://truth-and-beauty.net/projects/on-broadway)