Putting twitter data on the map

Analyzing Social Media Data in R

Sowmya Vivek

Data Science Coach

Lesson overview

Types of geolocation data available in tweets
Sources of geolocation information
Extract location details from tweets
Plot the tweet location data on maps

Why put twitter data on the map

Mapping locations help understand where tweets are concentrated
Influence people in those locations with targeted marketing
Understand reactions to planned or unplanned events

Include geographic metadata

Twitter users can geo-tag a tweet when it is posted
Two types of geolocation metadata
- Place
- Precise location

Place

"Place" location is selected from a predefined list
Includes a bounding box with latitude and longitude coordinates
Not necessarily issued from the location of the tweet

Tweet with place location

Precise location

Specific longitude and latitude "Point" coordinate from GPS-enabled devices
Represents the exact GPS location
Only 1-2% of tweets are geo-tagged

Sources of geolocation information

The tweet text
User account profile
Twitter Place added by the user
Precise location point coordinates

Extract tweets

library(rtweet)

# Extract 18000 tweets on "#politics"
pol <- search_tweets("#politics", n = 18000)

Extract geolocation data

# Extract geolocation data and append new columns
pol_coord <- lat_lng(pol)

The coordinates are extracted from the columns, coords_coords or bbox_coords

View lat and lng columns

View(pol_coord)

lat and lng columns

Omit rows with missing lat and lng values

# Omit rows with missing lat and lng values
pol_geo <- na.omit(pol_coord[, c("lat", "lng")])

View geocoordinates

head(pol_geo)

lat            lng
<dbl>         <dbl>
19.17414    72.874244            
53.35490    -6.247621            
53.27350    -6.399521            
53.67989     9.372680            
12.92311    77.558448            
54.59940    -5.836670

Plot geo-coordinates on the US state map

# Plot longitude and latitude values of tweets on US state map
map(database = "state", fill = TRUE, col = "light yellow")

with(pol_geo, points(lng, lat, pch = 20, cex = 1, col = 'blue'))

View the locations on the US state map

Plot of geo-coordinates on the US state map

Plot geocoordinates on the world map

# Plot longitude and latitude values of tweets on the world map
map(database = "world", fill = TRUE, col = "light yellow")

with(pol_geo, points(lng, lat, pch = 20, cex = 1, col = 'blue'))

View the locations on the world map

Plot of geocoordinates on the world map

Let's practice!

Analyzing Social Media Data in R