Overview

Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 0 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

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.

Some day we will sit down and tell you why.

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