Maps and Twitter data

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python

Alex Hanna

Computational Social Scientist

Why maps?

• Geographical scope
  • Participants or observers?
• Differentiating tweets
  • For or against?

How Twitter gets location data

• Location is device-dependent
• In practice, aggregate geographical to county, state-level

Beware selection biases!

• Warning: only 1-3% of Twitter data have geographical data
• Limits the generalizability of inference

Types of geographical data available in Twitter

• Twitter text (most imprecise)
• User location
• Bounding boxes
• Coordinates and points (most precise)

Let's practice!

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python