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3 billion tweets on a map

3 billion tweets on a map

Its been hard this past few days to find anyone willing to say a bad word about the new Locals and Tourists map from that magic combination...MapBox, Eric Fischer and Gnip. All capable of producing cool stuff. This is broadly what you get from their collaboration...a multiscale cached map of the world showing 3 billion dots each one red or blue:


The MapBox blog explains it in more detail but essentially its every geotagged tweet since September 2011, categorised as either red to indicate a tweet from a tourist and blue, a tweet from a local.

Its impressive in scale and scope. It looks beautiful. The crowd on the interwebs are going gaga for it. I like it as a piece of map porn along with the multitude of other such works Id put in that category.

Where I perhaps differ from some, though, is in casting a critical eye on the actuality of the map and bypassing the hype and rhetoric so heres a few thoughts...

The map claims to show incredible new detail, demographic, cultural and social patterns down to city level. It apparently allows you to explore stories of space, language and access to technology.  OK, if theyd left it at "heres a cool looking map, whaddya think" Id have bought it but cmon.

The points are just geotagged tweets. Best estimates suggest only 1% of tweets are geotagged. Some 13% of them dont have exact coordinates. It might be reasonable to suggest were looking at a sample of all tweeters but is the sample the same or sufficiently similar across all places to make the assumption we can compare like for like? We dont know.

And what of the demographics of Twitter Use? 67% of all internet users use social media. People who live in cities spend more time on social media. Only 16% of those who use social media use Twitter and they are most likely to be adults aged between 18-29...and male.

In short, the data itself is full of error, bias and uncertainty. You cant make any sensible inferences from a map like this. You certainly cannot claim to be able to explore the map in the way suggested.

And then we get to the classification of the data. Tweets are red if the user has posted for one consecutive month in the same place and blue for users whose tweets are normally elsewhere. And from that, theyve decided they are able to identify locals and tourists. Spurious to say the least. There are probably hundreds of ways that this rule can be broken and someone move from the red to the blue or vice versa. It may be a convenient hook for the map title but as a classification it is based in fantasy.

Finally we get to the map...take a look and check out places you are familiar with. Does it stack up? More likely than not the answer is no. There appears a much larger element of so-called tourism in places youd hardly classify as tourist spots and where there are tourist honeypots or towns...theres no discernable difference. Roads are predominantly comprised of red dots as are motorway service stations and anywhere else that people travel through.

The map is largely empty in areas youd expect there to be lower levels of mobile phone usage (most of the developing world) but we know this already. The map doesnt tell us anything new. Does it give us an insight into large scale city level detail? Not really....its patchy at best and why not just use a decent street map if thats what you need to find out.

Finally, I was curious about how the red and blue dots were displayed. Having just spent quite some time making a dasymetric dot density map of the 2012 Presidential election results Im quite familiar with the problems of representing a lot of blue and red dots in close proximity. In order to give equal visual weighting to each colour you have to do a little bit of processing of the data (well, quite a bit actually). So what have they done with the twitter map? I re-engineered the map and played around with the tiles and its clear that theyve just overprinted the blue dots with the red dots. One layer on top of another. In visual terms, then, the map gives far more prominence to the red tourist dots which, of course, makes for a more interesting map. Heres a quick comparison:


Two completely different maps. Two completely different impressions of the data...but users of the map dont get that choice; they get the map on the left and base their interpretations on that...incorrectly.

Lets get one thing clear...as a piece of map porn its spectacular. It also demonstrates that technologically, the mapping world is really at the cutting edge of handling large data sets (not big data per se...this is just a lot of data). The point of this blog, though, is to counter the common perception of this sort of work. There are big questions regarding bias, error and uncertainty and how we represent this sort of data for mass public consumption. Is it useful? Can we really find anything out from it? Or is it just art? Maps have always lied its true but far more eyes are cast over work these days simply because of its accessibility online and the way social media itself transmits the latest and greatest ideas...but the internet has no quality control, no quality assurance and as with everything out there, if you consume it without taking a moment to think about what it is youre looking at you just drink the Koolaid.

Enjoy it for what it is but dont be taken in by the rhetoric. It is what it is, nothing more...despite what the label says and what all those likes and re-tweets infer.

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