Map Visualisations Show Languages Spoken, Device Use, and Locals-Tourists Ratio Using Twitter Data
Custom website map designers MapBox and social media data analysts Gnip have worked together to visualise geotagged data from 3 billion individual tweets, creating three distinctive interactive maps.
MapBox’s Tom MacWright and data artist Eric Fischer used Gnip’s data and MapBox’s open source tools to categorize, colour code and visualize every geotagged tweet posted since September 2011.
They created three global maps: one which separated locals from tourists, one which categorized tweets by their language and one which categorized tweets by the device they were sent from. In a blog post, MapBox CEO Eric Gundersen described the process:
This is big data, and there's a significant level of geographic overlap between tweets, so Eric wrote an open-source tool that de-duplicated 2.7 billion overlapping datapoints, leaving 280 million unique locations.The first map, Locals and Tourists, pinpoint locals – “who post in one city for one consecutive month” – as blue and tourists as red.
Languages on Twitter, the second map, colour coordinates each tweet by language. Unsurprisingly, English and Spanish dominate the Twittersphere.
Perhaps the most interesting map, Mobile Devices + Twitter Use, separates tweets by device: Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Other.
Apple devices dominate Western Europe and the United States, but Android has a stronghold in Spain. In Asia, meanwhile, Japan is pretty evenly split between Android and iPhone users, but Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines favour Blackberry.
On all three maps, each colour can be toggled on and off.
Are you surprised by the data visualized by the maps?
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Will Sigsworth
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Map Visualisations Show Languages Spoken, Device Use, and Locals-Tourists Ratio Using Twitter Data
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Reviewed by Anonymous
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Thursday, June 20, 2013
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Anonymous
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