Government
Why Most Twitter Maps Can't Be Trusted
A sophisticated age demands a more sophisticated social media cartography.
When geographers Taylor Shelton, Ate Poorthuis* and Matthew Zook decided to study the tricky phenomenon of race-based spatial segregation in Louisville, Kentucky, they had a few options. They could have, as Poorthuis put it in an interview, “set up an entire study [and] given [Louisville residents] GPS trackers and diaries." But "that would require 18 months of planning and lot of money," he says. "Too much money.”
So the geographers went the cheaper, faster route: Twitter data. Specifically, they pulled data from 5.7 million tweets geotagged to Louisville, Kentucky, between June 2012 and July 2014.