The Most Impressive Live Global Twitter Map, Ever?
My colleague Kalev Leetaru has just launched The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project in partnership with the Cyber Infrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI) and GNIP. He shared more information on this impressive initiative with the CrisisMappers Network this morning.
According to Kalev, the project “uses an SGI super-computer to visualize the Twitter Decahose live, applying fulltext geocoding to bring the number of geo-located tweets from 1% to 25% (using a full disambigua-ting geocoder that uses all of the user’s available information in the Twitter stream, not just looking for mentions of major cities), tone-coding each tweet using a twitter-customized dictionary of 30,000 terms,
and applying a brand-new four-stage heatmap engine (this is where the supercomputer comes in) that makes a map of the number of tweets from or about each location on earth, a second map of the average tone of all tweets for each location, a third analysis of spatial proximity (how close tweets are in an area), and a fourth map as needed for the percent of all of those tweets about a particular topic, which are then all brought together into a single heatmap that takes all of these factors into account, rather than a sequence of multiple maps.”
Kalev added that, “For the purposes of this demonstration we are processing English only, but are seeing a nearly identical spatial profile to geotagged all-languages tweets (though this will affect the tonal results).” The Twitterbeat team is running a live demo showing both a US and world map updated in realtime at Supercomputing on a PufferSphere and every few seconds on the SGI website here.”
Read full post with two embedded short videos.
Phi Beta Iota: Advanced Information Operations (far removed from what is practiced today) can identify, communicate with, incentivive, and harvest from, individual Twitterers at pre-specified time and space locations.
See Also:
2011 Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point
