The Geography of Buzz, a project of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, “set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles.” In layman’s terms, they were trying to map the intangible “buzz” from celebrity-driven arts-and-entertainment events. The researchers did so by categorizing and geotagging more than 300,000 photos from the Getty Images database that were catalogued as arts and entertainment, from 6,000 events in New York and Los Angeles. The locations of these events served as a “proxy” for buzz measurement. Buzz, the researchers discovered, is not evenly distributed (here’s a PDF of the researchers’ working paper). “The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo,” says the New York Times. “In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park.”

Via My Wonderful World and The Map Scroll.