Archipelago is a project produced as a visualisation & spatial analysis of activity across three cities on the Foursquare social network. Around a million data points are included in the analysis. The project is based on an image of the city as a social archipelago.

Foursquare is a location-based social network which users interact with on their 3G mobile phones. Users can ‘checkin’ at different social venues (bars, restaurants, museums, theatres, etc) across their city. By visualising the aggregate data produced by networks such as these, we can see how social activity in a city is distributed.

You can visit the project page or get some background on the data and analytical techniques.