The UB app is a research tool for studying urban belonging across visual ethnography and digital methods. Its interface enables the user to take photos of urban phenomena and indicate both the sentiment and the content of the picture taken. Furthermore, the user is allowed to react with similar annotations to the photos of other participants in the research project. This makes it possible to study how groups of users belong to the city in different ways.
The app is published together with a set of scripts that turns its output into data visualizations in the form of e.g. network graphs and geographical maps. The methodological idea is that these visualizations can be used as elicitation devices in qualitative focus groups around the pictures taken. The patterns in these visualizations can also be used to select who to put together in such a focus group setting. An example could be to bring people together that have very different interpretations of an area or a series of photos to discuss this. Or to group people that use the same annotations. The possibilities are many.
The UB app was developed as part of the project ‘Urban Belonging’ that studied how members of different organizations in Copenhagen (e.g. minorities, handicapped and LGBTQ+) felt a sense of belonging to the city. The project was a collaboration between researchers from Aalborg University, GEHL architects, IT University of Copenhagen and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The project is built upon the app 'Snappthis' by Marije ten Brink and its redevelopment was funded by Ander Koed Madsen's project 'Doing Data Together', developed by Iain Kettles and designed by Marcos Cisneros. The code and the Figma file behind the app is open source. The app is handled through an API that you can get a key for by contacting akma@hum.aau.dk. More information about the urban belonging team, the thoughts behind the app and its possible research applications can be found at https://urbanbelonging.com/.