The Urban Geographies of Tweets in Africa

This is a quick post containing a few visualisations of information densities in a selection of African cities.

Below, you can find maps of all geocoded tweets published in November 2012 in Accra, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos, Tunis, Nairobi, Kigali, Mogadishu, and Addis Ababa.

Look for the information presences and absences; groups of people who are and aren't participating in each city. But also look at the significant differences between cities. Cities like Nairobi, Cairo, and Cape Town are swimming in thick clouds of information, whereas in Mogadishu and Addis Ababa we barely find any digital geospatial information at all. 

If you're interested in why these geographies of information might matter, then check out any the articles at the end of this post. Otherwise, enjoy the maps - and please share any insights you have about any of these cities (or let us know if there are other cities that you'd like to see mapped).

Relevant articles:

Graham, M. 2013. Virtual Geographies and Urban Environments: Big data and the ephemeral, augmented city. In Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice. eds. M. Acuto and W. Steele. London: Palgrave. (in press).

Graham, M and M. Zook. 2013. Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web. Environment and Planning A 45(1) 77-99.

Graham, M., M. Zook., and A. Boulton. 2012. Augmented Reality in the Urban Environment: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00539.x  

The Maps of Sheepallenge

In our first annual Sheepallenge competition, teams from around the world (well, parts of it anyways) competed to produce the best visualization using a dataset relating to the seven deadly sins. We've included some of our favorite submissions below, but please feel free to comment and let us know which are your favorites.

In the Animated/Interactive category:
Interactive map of Political Sex Scandals: you must click on the link to get the full scandalous effect
(Montserrat Compa, Jasmine D'Angelo, M. Eiben and​ R. Gustas of Humboldt State University)

Coffee vs. Beer: an animated time-map of Coffee and Beer consumption. (Nathan Barth and Stephen Mangum of Humboldt State University)

We had two Seven Sins Choropleth maps:
http://users.humboldt.edu/eibenm/sheepallenge.html
(Matthew Eiben, Humboldt State University)
http://tiles.mapbox.com/gfs1119/ 
(Gwendolyn Schaefer and Jordan Miller, University of Kentucky)

Animated wrath of god: Zoom and pan through natural disasters caused by sinners (Jeremy Battles, Humboldt State University)

In the Static map category:
Anti-Cartograms: Teriitutea QUESNOT of Université Laval

"Rather than highlighting devilish states, I preferred to adopt a reverse logic by building anticartograms.  These anticartograms are based on the mathematical inverse function (1/x) : the area of each US State is consequently inversely proportionnal to the number of Tweets included in each state.  Moreover, we know that the seven heavenly virtues are not exactly the opposite of the seven deadly sins. Thus, the title of each anticartogram correspond to my own interpretation of each "antideadly sin" (e.g. « Twitter Buddhists » for the anticartogram of the « envy » deadly sin)."

The Bacon Map: Miles Ross, Letha Gimble, and Lars Erickson (Humboldt State University)

"If you want to run far far away from your grassroots vegan friends and join the bacon eating bandwagon you might try moving to a bigger city.  The results from this map revealed that Seattle was the most infatuated with this lardaceous meat, seen by the overwhelming sized bacon strip that has taken over the Pacific Northwest in the map.  Chicago, New York, Boston, Wichita are only a couple of the bigger cities feeding into this fattening fad."

Sinners Across The USA: Tanja Hopmans and Sean Jansen (Humboldt State University)

"Proportional text was created using geotagged Twitter data with tweeted keywords associated with each of the seven sins.  The text represents the maximum number of tweets of the sin, normalized by country, the size of the text represents the number of tweets associated with each sin."

Crunk n' Bible Studies: Boyd Shearer, outrageGIS.com

The goal was to determine the mood of county’s population, whether they were tweeting more about getting drunk or going to bible study. Two groups of geocoded tweets were sampled from DOLLY for the time period June 21 to November 29, 2012. Roughly 8,000 tweets were collected for each population. The “crunk” population was created from tweets that said, “Let’s get drunk,” “Let’s get fucked up,” and “Let’s get crunk.” Minor variations were also added to this population, e.g., “Let’s get crazy fucked up!” The second population was created from tweets that said, “bible study.” Assuming authors meant what they tweeted, a rather unscientific sampling of each population determined an error rate in the sentiment analysis. Approximately 4 out of 100 tweets in the “crunk” population were of a mocking or derisive tone about getting drunk, while 2 out 100 tweets in the “bible study” population were not about studying the bible as illustrated in the following tweet, “Just got asked to go to bible study....no.”

Rich Kids of Instagram: Ryan Cooper and Sonya Prasertong, University of Kentucky

"Our visualization was inspired by the website richkidsofinstagram.tumblr.com, where photos that affluent teens/young adults post on Instagram (as well as their captions) are posted. These photos and captions are often an absurd/over-the-top flaunting of their wealth, posted to inspire envy amongst us lay people. The website is a catalog of these photos, and highlights this strange phenomenon of conspicuous hyperconsumptions represented through social media. By mashing the number of RKOI-based Tweets against median household income we can begin to query deeper questions of income disparities, material consumption practices, and what it really means to #getonmylevel.”

Each of the authors above have won a t-shirt award and a certificate suitable for framing. 

Honorable Mentions
The Good, The Bad and The American: Robert Gustas and Jessica Beck, Humboldt State University

Tweets of Chastity and Lust: James Knoer

In Greed we Trust: Catherine Hoyle, Humboldt State University

Lazy Humidity: Mark and David Cross, University of Kentucky

Seattle, Capital of Greed?: Lila Garcia, University of Washington

Sins Vs. Shows: Derek Ichen, Humboldt State University

The Evil of WalMart and Jersey Shore: Stuart Denoon-Stevens, Cape Town, South Africa

PDF Brochure available here

Congratulations to everybody who participated. The maps we received were fantastic beyond our wildest sheep-filled dreams!

New Special Issue of E&PA: Situating Neogeography

The new special issue of Environment and Planning A on neogeography edited by Matthew Wilson and Mark Graham, and featuring a handful of pieces by members of the Floatingsheep team and other friends of the sheep, is now out and available to download. The complete table of contents is below:

Theme issue: Situating neogeography

Guest editors: Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Guest editorial
Situating neogeography
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Neogeography and volunteered geographic information: a conversation with Michael Goodchild and Andrew Turner
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Crowdsourced cartography: mapping experience and knowledge
Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin

Situating performative neogeography: tracing, mapping, and performing “Everyone’s East Lake”
Wen Lin

Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation
Mordechai (Muki) Haklay

Commentary: Political applications of the geoweb: citizen redistricting
Jeremy W. Crampton

Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web

Mark Graham, Matthew Zook

Featured graphic: Mapping the geoweb: a geography of Twitter
Mark Graham, Monica Stephens, Scott Hale

p.s. feel free drop Mark a note if you don't have institutional access to journal and would like email copies of any of the articles. 

Premier League teams on Twitter (or why Liverpool wins the league and the Queen might support West Ham)

Have you ever wondered where Premier League football teams draw most of their support from? Or what the geography of fandom is? We have too, and set about to better understand how Premiership teams are reflected in Twitter usage across the UK.

The Floatingsheep team, with the help of two researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute - Joshua Melville and Scott A. Hale (both of whom did most of the work) - have created a neat interactive map for you to both explore the geography of Twitter mentions of specific teams, and let you explore the patterns of five key rivalries. Click on the screenshot below to be brought to the full interactive map. 

The data used include all geotagged tweets mentioning any of the Premiership football teams and their associated hashtags (e.g., #MUFC or #YNWA) that were sent between August 18 and December 19, 2012. We have only included one tweet per user to prevent 'loud' fans from skewing the results. The users were then aggregated to postcode districts in order to see a fairly fine-grained geography of results. The number of tweeters per district is normalized by the total 'population' of Twitter users based on a 0.25% random sample of all tweets within the UK. 

What do the data show us, you ask? In Manchester, for instance, there is the oft-repeated stereotype that Manchester City are the 'real' local team, while Manchester United attract support from further afield. Our map doesn't really support that idea though. There are only a few parts of Greater Manchester in which we see significant more tweets mentioning Manchester City than their local rivals. We also, strangely, see more mentions of Manchester City in Scotland and Merseyside, and more support for Manchester United in Northern Ireland.

The Merseyside rivalry (Liverpool vs. Everton) is another interesting one to map. There we see that Liverpool have the slight edge in the postcode that is home to both team's stadiums. However, there is no clear winner in the rest of the region: with most postcodes having a fairly close split between the two teams. Interestingly, many postcodes in Scotland seem to have more mentions of Everton; while many in Northern Ireland have more mentions of Liverpool.

We can also zoom into particular postcodes and see which teams are most mentioned there. The  academics in Oxford (for some strange reason) mention Manchester City more than any other team. Central Edinburgh (when not focusing on Hearts or Hibs) has more mentions of Everton than any other Club. And the Queen's home of SW1A goes for West Ham.

What about maybe the most important question of all. Who wins the league based on total number of Tweets sent from anywhere in the UK? The answer is Liverpool (a team that hasn't won the actual league since 1990).  Manchester United are a somewhat distant second, joined by Everton and Tottenham in the Champions League spots. We also find out that Fulham, Swansea, and Wigan are the three teams that get relegated due to their quite abysmal scores. Apparently just not that many people want to tweet about Wigan.

There is no doubt that using Tweets as a proxy for fandom is messy and not always reliable. In other words, we are mapping mentions and not measuring sentiment. But, the data do give us a rough sense of who is interested in (or at least talking about what), and where they are doing it from. It allows to begin to counter myths (e.g. that Mancunians don't support Manchester United), develop new insights about places that we don't necessarily have good data about, and most importantly, have some guesses as to which team the Queen might support.

See also:
A broader take on how information augments place (a second paper on the topic can be accessed here)
Other examples of our Twitter mapping (racism, flooding, earthquakes)
The code behind this visualisation (made freely [CC-BY-NC-SA] available on Github)

The Bluegrass Basketball Battle

In Kentucky, basketball means everything -- especially college basketball, and especially the intrastate rivalry between the Kentucky Wildcats and the Louisville Cardinals, one of the greatest in all of college sports. Growing up in Louisville, one can't help but choose sides and develop one's debating skills, arguing with classmates, family and friends over whether Patrick Sparks traveled in 2004 or whether Rick Pitino is the modern-day basketball equivalent of Benedict Arnold. But given our connections to the University of Kentucky (and Taylor's fandom), the upcoming game and the tools at our disposal, we thought it might be time to wade in on the age-old debate between the two sides.

A recent public opinion poll of Kentucky by Public Policy Polling piqued our interest, as it found that Kentucky fans outnumber Louisville fans in the state by an overwhelming 66% to 17% margin. But how do the two fanbases stack up on Twitter?

We took to DOLLY to collect references to the two general-purpose hashtags used by fans of each team and promoted by the respective athletics departments -- #BBN (for Big Blue Nation) and #L1C4 (for Louisville First, Cards Forever) -- in geotagged tweets created between June 21, 2012 and December 20, 2012, in order to measure the both the absolute numbers and geographic distribution of UK and UL fans at the national, statewide and local scales as reflected by Twitter.

Number of Tweets referencing #BBN or #L1C4

According to the aforementioned poll's 66-to-17 margin, there are ~3.9x more UK fans than UL fans in Kentucky. This finding is mirrored almost exactly by our measures of tweeting, where the 6,371 geotagged references to #BBN in the state are also 3.9x greater than the 1,628 references to #L1C4. And while the number of tweets for each team are essentially equal within the city of Louisville, UK fandom becomes even more dominant once one moves outside of the Commonwealth, with there being over 10.5x more #BBN tweets than #L1C4 tweets in the US outside of Kentucky, for a total of 4.9x more UK tweets than UL tweets nationwide. So not only does UK hold an ever-so-slight advantage within Louisville's homebase, it shows increasing popularity as one moves to the larger scales of the state and nation.

#BBN vs. #L1C4 Nationwide

But when we visualize these tweets, we get a better idea for just how geographically concentrated these patterns of fandom are. For instance, 599 of the 3,141 US counties had references to either #BBN or #L1C4. But of these, only 35 counties had a greater number of references to #L1C4, with Butler County, KY holding the dubious honor of being the only county in the Commonwealth with more references to #L1C4. Of the remaining counties, 554 had more references to #BBN, and only 10 counties in the country had an equal number of tweets referencing #BBN and #L1C4.

#BBN and #L1C4 in the Commonwealth of Kentucky

Also interesting is that no county in the US apart from Jefferson County, KY (Louisville and Jefferson County have a merged government, and so are coterminous) has more than 100 tweets with references to #L1C4, highlighting the essentially limited spatial distribution of UL fans. And though Jefferson County does have a few more UK tweets than UL tweets, one doesn't have to go far to find the county with the largest margin of UL-related tweets over UK-related tweets; right across the river from Louisville in Clark County, Indiana there are 20 more #L1C4 than #BBN tweets.

Meanwhile, Kentucky holds a decisive advantage in its hometown of Lexington-Fayette County, with 1,588 more #BBN tweets than #L1C4 tweets. But the county with the second-highest margin favoring UK is all the way south in Broward County, Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) with a +299 margin favoring UK.

#BBN vs. #L1C4 in Louisville

Within Louisville, the absolute number of tweets are almost equal, as mentioned previously; but, interestingly enough, the geographies of UK and UL tweeting are quite different. The clustering of #L1C4 tweets tends to be around the UL campus and downtown areas, while UK tweeting tends to be more spatially distributed, with many tweets coming from more suburban, residential areas in the city. So while the vast majority of UL tweets across the country are located in Louisville, a still significant number come from within just a handful of square miles surrounding the UL campus in downtown Louisville, perhaps indicating the limited appeal of a team that's lost four-straight games to the defending-champion Wildcats.

#L1C4? More like #L1C4.9xLessPopularThanUK.

UPDATE: See today's article over at ESPN.com, "The Commonwealth's great divide", which discusses some of the same geographic dimensions of UK and UL fandom we are showing here. It includes this interesting passage:

In 2005, the Courier-Journal polled fans on their sports loyalties and 53.7 percent within the city counted themselves as UL fans compared to just 33 percent who identified themselves as Cats fans. And according to the two schools' alumni associations, Louisville understandably has a far greater base in Jefferson County (54,872 living alumni) than Lexington (16,112). 

But here's the catch: There are just 22,160 living Louisville alumni in the rest of the state and other than Fayette County (where Lexington sits), none of Kentucky's 120 counties boasts more UK grads than Jefferson.

While we weren't aware of these figures at the time of our initial post, they not only tend to confirm some of our findings, but indeed only lend even more credence to our assertion that UK fans seem to be more voracious tweeters than their UL counterparts, as the roughly 50-50 split in tweeting in Louisville is significantly askew from the 54-33 numbers from the Courier-Journal's 2005 survey.

Does the Pope Tweet in the Woods?

The Guardian posted one of our maps today on the spatial distribution of the the Pope's followers on Twitter. However, they decided not to use our suggested  tag line "does the pope tweet in the woods?". We can't understand why. But rather than let this rhetorical gem disappear into the mists of the Internet, we're also posting the map here as well as a map on the location of tweets containing the term Pontifex (the name of the Pope's Twitter account). Apparently the pope is very big in Italy... who knew?

Location of Tweets containing the term "pontifex", December 2012

(note, these are raw counts rather than normalized)

We're also hiring a researcher in spatial statistics!

In addition to our new position in Internet Geography, we are now also hiring a full-time five-month researcher to study the geographies of user-generated content and participation on Wikipedia. We specifically seek to employ a researcher with experience in quantitative geography or quantitative sociology in order to statistically explain national and sub-national patterns and geographies of Wikipedia articles and editing behaviour.

Across the globe, daily economic, social and political activities increasingly revolve around the use of social content on the Internet. This user-generated content influences our understandings of, and interactions with, our social environment. Despite rapid increase in Internet access, there are indications that many people remain largely absent from websites and services, and many voices are absent from important platforms of information.

We explore this phenomenon through one of the world's most visible and most accessed source of content: Wikipedia. This project will employ a range of (primarily quantitative) methods to assess, explain, and model the variable levels of access, participation and representation on Wikipedia.

Candidates should have a keen interest in platforms of peer-production and the geographies of online participation. We welcome applications from candidates with a background in statistical methods, a strong record of scholarly research, and a desire to co-author academic publications.

Based at the Oxford Internet Institute, this position is available immediately for five months in the first instance, with the possibility of renewal thereafter funding permitting.

Applications for this vacancy are to be made online. To apply for this role and for further details, including a job description and selection criteria, please click on the following link: https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=105871

Only applications received before 12:00 midday on 14th January 2013 can be considered. Interviews for those short-listed are currently planned to take place in the week commencing 21st January 2013.

Please also feel free to get in touch with any questions about the position. 

Relevant links:
A collection of our Wikipedia research
Our Wikipedia project focused on the Middle East and North Africa