In­s­tagram posts can show­case the city high­lights, un­cover the as­pir­a­tions of res­id­ents, and il­lus­trate a vari­ety of their activ­it­ies in pub­lic spaces.

While we should not ex­pect it to de­liver an ac­cur­ate pic­ture of real­ity, In­s­tagram can still be a valu­able source of data for city re­search. Scrolling through feeds and ex­plor­ing hasht­ags can be end­less fun for city re­search­ers. But how to speed it up by auto­mat­ing the ex­trac­tion of thou­sands of posts for fur­ther data min­ing?

We auto­mated the ex­trac­tion of posts by de­vel­op­ing a Py­thon pack­age that fa­cil­it­ates the pro­cess of:

• scrap­ing posts from In­s­tagram API
• pre­pro­cessing and clean­ing
• ana­lysis and visu­al­isa­tion

See in de­tail how we ex­plored Brat­is­lava parks using Py­thon and In­s­tagram API.