[Air-L] gnip now offering geolocation of twitter profiles and text

Deen Freelon dfreelon at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 19:57:34 PDT 2013


Thanks for the shoutout, Alex. One of my main points was that while the 
advances in Kalev et al's paper are quite impressive--they provide an 
order of magnitude more location coverage than GPS tagging 
alone--representativeness is still a huge issue. There's an important 
paper yet to be written about systematic differences between the sets of 
Twitter users whose locations can and cannot be reliably identified--I'd 
be shocked if the two groups were statistically indistinguishable. ~DEEN

On 8/23/2013 7:17 PM, kalev leetaru wrote:
> Alex, while it is of course impossible to know the true representativeness
> of Twitter and in particular even the representativeness of users with the
> different classes of geographic fields, two key findings are that
> sensor-based tweets (ie, Exact Location tweets via GPS and cellular
> triangulation) are highly spatially correlated with the distribution of
> power via the NASA Night Lights imagery, suggesting that there is not a
> strong macro-level spatial skew in the availability of sensor-based tweets
> (ie, that Western users are more likely to have GPS tagging of their tweets
> enabled) and secondly, that the results of geocoding user profiles is, in
> turn, highly spatially correlated with sensor-based tweets.
>
> ~Kalev
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Very interesting. Wonder how they're dealing with the limitations.
>>
>> http://dfreelon.org/2013/05/12/twitter-geolocation-and-its-limitations/
>> http://takhteyev.org/papers/Takhteyev-Wellman-Gruzd-2010.pdf
>>
>> Alexander Leavitt
>> PhD Student
>> USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
>> http://alexleavitt.com
>> Twitter: @alexleavitt
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 1:59 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone, for those of you trying to map tweets in your work, I just
>>> saw
>>> that GNIP is now offering geographic enrichment of their Twitter stream
>>> that geocodes both the Location information in user profiles AND the tweet
>>> text itself (it separates the two) and makes this available as lat/long
>>> data for mapping/filtering/etc alongside the traditional sensor-based and
>>> software-set Exact Location and Place geographic fields.
>>>
>>> http://blog.gnip.com/twitter-geo-data-enrichment/
>>>
>>> While GNIP is using their own engine for this, you can see an overview of
>>> what the profile and tweet text geography of Twitter looks like in my
>>> paper
>>> from earlier this year:
>>>
>>> http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654
>>>
>>> Thought I would share this with the list since using GNIP's stream you can
>>> now essentially leave the geographic coding to them and just get an
>>> additional set of metadata for each tweet capturing what geographic
>>> information it contains, making it trivial to map tweets both by where
>>> they
>>> are coming from and where they are talking about...
>>>
>>>
>>> Kalev Leetaru
>>> Yahoo! Fellow in Residence
>>> Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
>>> Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
>>> Georgetown University
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
>>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
>>> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>>>
>>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>>> http://www.aoir.org/
>>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/


-- 
Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
American University School of Communication
Office: Asbury 228A
dfreelon at gmail.com
http://dfreelon.org




More information about the Air-L mailing list