City through Foursquare
My capstone project at the Strelka Institute, presented in spring 2012. I read Moscow through Foursquare check-ins — classifying places by how people used them (home, work, parks, retail, cafes) and mapping where the city's everyday life actually clustered.
It started as a course project, and with the tools and methods I've picked up since, I'd build it differently today. The questions it asked have stayed with me, though, and the images still hold up.
It also opened a longer thread. The check-in work grew into 4sqStat, built with Alexander Muzychenko, and seeded the habit of reading a city through its digital traces — the approach I carried into data journalism and, later, graduate work.