Spatial Analysis » Twitter

Mapping Academic Tweets

James — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:42:26 +0000

Another day, another Twitter map- this time showing the global distribution of tweets that link to academic journal articles. I am always a bit skeptical of Twitter data (especially with location information) but as an academic seeking to publish in many of the journals that feature in people’s tweets I was prepared to make an exception when producing these maps. The data come from a cool service called Altmetric.

I think mapping Twitter’s engagement with the academic literature is important as it echos the map below and provides another example of the dominance of researchers (both in terms of access and production) from a few countries in the academic literature.

You can see how the “hotspots” of collaboration allign with the hotspots of tweets below.

One thing academics strive for is “impact”. This can mean many things, but one often applied criterion is the number of people outside of your immediate academic community that read your work. Twitter is becoming increasingly cited as an example of impact (for example how many followers an academic has), but as these maps demonstrate, much of the engaged audience is already where work is relatively easily accessible.

About the data from Altmetric:

“This dataset lists the ~ 58k tweets that mentioned a scientific article (broadly speaking anything with a DOI, PMID or arxiv ID) between the 1st and 31st of July 2011.

Recall isn’t 100%: my best estimate is that it’s missing another ~ 6k tweets where the article couldn’t be identified, the link was malformed or the journal involved is new or gets very low traffic.

Twitter’s TOS prohibit re-distribution of the tweets themselves but the dataset contains the extracted links, the tweet ID and some information about the tweeter (screen name, country & lat/lng derived from their location using Yahoo! Placemaker).“

#ffgeo: Follow Friday for all things geographical.

James — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:55:24 +0000

Just for a bit of fun and to help those of us with interests in all things geographical, spatial, GIS, maps and cartographic (I could go on…), I thought I would add “geo” to the usual Follow Friday (#ff) twitter hashtag to create #ffgeo. So if you have particularly enjoyed the geo-related tweets from one or several people this week, list their user names and include the #ffgeo hashtag so that fellow lovers of all things geo will know to check them out.

It may not take off, or it could be come a weekly event. Either way you can monitor progress below or here.

Snowtweets

James — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:39:58 +0000

Aside from an interest in surnames, I keep an eye on cold-regions research. I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate studying glaciers and became heavily involved in the Polar Science/ Cold Regions research community. Many of the results from this research are extremely relevant as they inform to a large extent the climate change debate. Unfortunately, I often found myself speaking with many researchers who lacked the technical ability and motivation to engage with the public and harness the growing power of Volunteered Geographic Information.

I am therefore extremely impressed with the University of Waterloo’s (Canada)Snowtweets Project. The project, inspired by a UK snow map from Ben Marsh, encourages people to measure snow depths in their local area and instantly publish them to the web via Twitter. Snowtweet users can downlo

ad a standalone viewer called Snowbird that has been developed with Adobe Flex and Papervision3D. The use of NASA Visible Earth Imagery, a clean interface and great graphics make this a very compelling application. I hope Snowtweets will become very popular in the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter so that it provides a great source of data by empowering the public to engage with cold/ temperate regions research.