Mapping the world with Tweets
Posted By Joshua Keating
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - 3:39 PM
A new paper on the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday summarizes the results of a project to use geographic data gathered from Tweets to create a picture of the world according to Twitter.
The researches, led by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru, used the Twitter decahose, a massive feed of 10 percent of all tweets, access to which is normally sold at high price to marketers. The project covers the period of the Oct. 23, 2102, to November 30, 2012. During this time, 1,535,929,521 tweets were streamed from 71,273,997 unique users -- about 2.8 terabytes worth of data. But only about 3.04 percent of those contained geolocation data -- either exact coordinates from mobile phones or user-selected locations. All the same, that's an awful lot of geographical information, and allowed the authors to create this map of a month in the life of Twitter (Bigger, high-resolution version here):
Of course, the most conspicuous black spot is the world's most populous country, China, where Twitter is banned. Twitter users in China use advanced VPNs and often change their identified location, which would throw off the image.
If you zoom in on a region with a high rate of Twitter use, you can get a fairly accurate picture of population density, similar to what you would see in a satellite photo showing electric lights at night. Here's the United States: