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Mapping Twitter city landscapes

July 6, 2010
Filed Under: in Analysis, Real-Time Web, Social Media
Author: Simon Rogers

[Editor’s Note: Simon Rogers submits a bunch of really neat geographic data visualizations that can be loosely categorized as infographics via our newest content partnership with the UK Guardian. –mrh]


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article was written by Simon Rogers, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 6th July 2010 16.51 UTC

Increasingly developers are starting to use Twitter as a source for data - especially the handy geolocation details.

And one of the most elegant we've seen is this lovely piece of work from UrbanTick.

This is how they did it:

The data is derived from tweets sent via a mobile device that includes the location at the time of sending the message. The contours correspond to the density of tweets, the mountains rise over active locations and cliffs drop down in to calm valleys, flowing out to tweet deserts. Throughout the emerging landscape features have been renamed to reflect these conditions.

So London now looks like this, with the highest peak Soho Mountain, extending Eastward towards Liverpool Street:

And Paris like this:

And here's New York:

They got the data from their rather lovely Tweet-o-Meter, which measures Tweets in the most active Twitter locations around the world and is a joint project by CASA, University College London.

image

Any other Twitter geo visualisations we should be looking at?

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