Map: NYC's Twitter Traffic As A Contour Map

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London has created a contoured map of NYC's Twitter traffic, "New York City New City Landscape." The names of NYC neighborhoods (and NJ towns) are renamed—for instance, there's Penn Station Point (very high Twitter traffic) and Rikers Island Desert (low).

According to CASA's blog, "The highest New York point is the Time Square Peak. It sits within a ridge running down the length of Manhattan. It drops of in the south shortly after Chinatown Head and Little Italy Side. A second group of mountains are location around the Franklin Avenue Rock and a third in the Jamaica area... The data is derived from tweets sent via a mobile device that includes the location at the time of sending the message. The contours correspond to the density of tweets, the mountains rise over active locations and cliffs drop down in to calm valleys, flowing out to tweet deserts. Throughout the emerging landscape features have been renamed to reflect these conditions." You can see the areas via the images above or this map:

New York New City Landscape

[Via Londonist]

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By Jen Chung in News on June 29, 2010 2:20 PM

Comments [rss]

ides_of_march

This would be a lot more interesting if the outlines of Manhattan, long Island and NJ were more visible. This just looks like a blob.

longacre

Interesting, but some oddities.

* Astoria is a hotbed of tweets but isn't on the map.

* City University Hill is in Queens, pretty sure that should read St. John's University Hill.

emilydickinson

Well, the dataset they used only takes into account Tweets sent from mobile devices, and at the geolocation of where they were sent. So while a lot of people may be Tweeting about Astorio, they may be at work or somewhere else while this is occurring.

I noticed the same thing out in Ft. Hamilton/Bay Ridge, BK. There is a pretty large set of Twitter users that mention the neighborhood all the time, live here as well, but are most likely somewhere else when Tweeting on a mobile device.

The other thing is the way Twitter implements geolocation. It's a pretty new feature, and while it works pretty well, the data is only as good as the closest cell tower/gps point on your mobile, so that might cause a further skew.