Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• What can I do with the geographic information in tweets?

• How does Twitter represent places?

Objectives

• Polygons versus points in Twitter’s data

• Figure out when mapping is appropriate.

Why we shouldn’t map Twitter

Let’s put a map or a graph here that shows how very few tweets we expect to have a geotag

very few have geotags

Only a tiny little fraction of tweets have meaningful and useful geographic information. And even those that have Twitter’s geolocations embedded in them are pretty useless.

Count the geotagged tweets in one of our sets

Even fewer have a specific intentional location

Count the POINT geotagged tweets in one of our sets

The exercise here will be to show GitHub’s ability to map a twitter dataset.

Key Points

• Determining the location of a tweet when it happened is fuzzy.

• At best, it’s a proxy for ‘aboutness’

• Proceed with Caution and Respect Humans’ Privacy