Mapping the world with Tweets | War of Ideas
▻http://ideas.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/08/mapping_the_world_with_tweets?wp_login_redirect=0
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):
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/130508_geolocation%20map.JPG
This map (full size), shows the tweets color-coded by the language they’re written in. Note the colorful dots showing non-English tweets in the United States:
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/130508_languages.JPG
#twitter #visualisation