[Air-L] Research on Twitter - a couple of questions

[Pablo Garaizar Sagarminaga]

Hello,

On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:42:09 -0500 sava saheli singh
<savasaheli at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I don't claim to be an expert, but I am doing research on twitter
> > (very different aspects and data collection) and I will say this:
>    1. yes. many people do not geolocate their tweets or identify
> where they are, some have fictitious or humorous locations as well.
> while this in itself is not a problem, if it is being used as the
> only legitimate geographical identifier for data, I'd say that was
> problematic. 

When tweets are gathered through Twitter's APIs, the accuracy of the
geolocation information is also provided in many ways (e.g., as a
geographical point's latitude and longitude, a polygon representing an
area, a unique ID referencing a know place...). 

Some of them are very accurate (i.e., lat+long), and some of them are
not (i.e., a big polygon inferred from Geo-IP information, not GPS).

The good news is you can decide the accuracy level of your sample, and
understand why you're gathering apparently non-geolocated tweets from a
geolocated filter (e.g., get tweets near London).

Hope it helps ;-)

-- 
  Pablo Garaizar Sagarminaga
  Universidad de Deusto
  Avda. de las Universidades 24
  48007 Bilbao - Spain

  Phone:       +34-94-4139000 Ext 2512
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