The Most Popular of Barcelona on Instagram

Gaudíand some of its most emblematic architectural works, such as theSagrada Familia, thePark Güell, theCasa BatllóorLa Pedrera, are among the most mentioned tourist attractions by users ofInstagramthat publish content in English aboutBarcelona. This is indicated by a study carried out in recent months byEurecat, the Technological Center of Catalonia, thanks to a project bydeep learning led byRaúl Gómez, researcher of the Multimedia Technologies Unit of this center. The main objective of this project is "to discover which words and images Instagram users associate with Barcelona and any other added concept." For example, with Barcelona and culture, or Barcelona and fun, or Barcelona and food. The project, which is still under development, was initially presented a few months ago during the sixth edition of the Forum TurisTIC. To carry out the study, more than a million images published on Instagram during the last four months of 2017 and the first months of 2018 have been analyzed. The study reveals which are the most cited tourist attractions or places. In the case of posts made in English, in addition to the aforementioned references to Gaudí's architecture, the top spots in the ranking also include theCamp Nou, theTibidabo, theGothic QuarterandLa Rambla. The other popular terms refer to neighborhoods in Barcelona –theBarceloneta,Gràcia, theEixampleor thePoblenou- and other nearby destinations, such asSitgesorMontserrat. Besides the places, the Eurecat project analyzes all thewords linked to Barcelonabased on publications made by Instagram users. In the case of posts made in English, data provided to The New Barcelona Post by the project leader, Raúl Gómez, show that the ten most mentioned words are, in this order, "Spain", "travel", "love", "photography", "Catalunya", "art", "architecture", "beautiful", "city and "happy". Among the list of the 50 most frequent words are also "fashion", "Gaudí", "friendsorbeach". And, besides the architect Antoni Gaudí, the only other person on the list is the Barça footballerLeo Messi.The Eurecat project includes two tools. The first, calledTextNet, is responsible for analyzing all available text and learning relationships between words. The second, calledVisualNet, "learns to extract information from images that relates them to the language representation learned by TextNet," as explained in the project presentation.