Data-Mining a City's Visual Identity Paris looks like, well,
Paris, and like nowhere else on earth, which is a large part of
the charm of the French capital. As a tourist, you don’t even
have to visit the Eiffel Tower to know you’ve landed in La
Ville-Lumière. Wander down any side street in a residential
neighborhood, and the city simply has a distinctive look and
feel, the result of myriad small distinctions from the way
Parisian balconies are constructed to the style of the city’s
streetlights. When presented with random images of Paris, people
who have been there are surprisingly good at identifying the
place (as opposed to, say, Barcelona). A delightful research
project, from academics at Carnegie Mellon University and
INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, tried exactly this. The
researchers showed subjects a sampling of images of Paris, as
well as decoys from 11 other cities around the world. Subjects
correctly nailed Paris 79 percent of the time. (You can play
along with this game here.) "What this s