About ScenicOrNot

What is this site?

It’s a game — pit your aesthetic judgements against other users, and discover the lovely and not so lovely corners of Great Britain.

Where are all the pictures from?

The lovely people at Geograph.

Why did you build it?

Originally, mySociety wanted to gather a freely available nationwide dataset of scenicness, to use for mapumental. Now, the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School have taken over this website in order to research how scenicness impacts on human wellbeing.

How can I find out more about this scenicness research?

Here are the latest papers using the scenicness data:

Seresinhe, C. I., Preis, T., Mackerron, G. & Moat, H. S. (2019). Happiness is greater in more scenic locations. Scientific Reports, 9, 4498.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40854-6

Seresinhe, C. I., Moat, H. S., & Preis, T. (2018). Quantifying scenic areas using crowdsourced data. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 45, 567-582.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265813516687302

Seresinhe, C. I., Preis, T., & Moat, H. S. (2017). Using deep learning to quantify the beauty of outdoor places. Royal Society Open Science, 4, 170170.
https://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/7/170170

Seresinhe, C. I., Preis, T., & Moat, H. S. (2015). Quantifying the impact of scenic environments on health. Scientific Reports, 5, 16899.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899

If you would like to stay updated on the latest developments on this research then feel free to get in touch with the Data Science Lab or follow us at @thedatascilab.

Can I download the data generated by this site?

Sure, we’re happy to make the data available for other people to use under the Open Database Licence.

votes.tsv is a TSV file of all photos that have been rated 3 times or more. The columns are ID, latitude, longitude, average rating, population variance, the votes (comma separated), and the Geograph URI for the photo. The current file contains all the votes posted until February 2015.

There are 217,000 images (one for each of nearly 95% of the 1km grid squares in Great Britain), and we’re making sure each one is rated 3 times by different people, to help limit abuse, or the impact of people with terrible taste.

Who built it?

This site was originally built by The Dextrous Web (now Dextrous Digital) for mySociety. It is now hosted by the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School.

How do I get in touch?

Contact the Data Science Lab.

Follow @thedatascilab.