Mapping Hidden Twitter Data For Epidemiology

jamie found this visualization of air travel, which might be usable in some sort of proxy for the spread of flu virus (to choose a random application). Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada (and a former geneticist), searched Twitter for the phrase "Just landed in" and obtained lat/lon coordinates for both the indicated airport and the Twitter user's home location, as recorded in their Twitter profile. He then produced videos of multi-hour stretches of air travel that had been latent in the Twitter information stream.

Comments

Twitter RT

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what fraction of these are 'retweets' biasing the sample. And how many people will be inspired to pollute the data stream with tweets about 'Just landed at Luna Base' and so on...

Nothing to do with the virus?

[4D6963]

Correct me if I'm wrong but all it does is probing on traffic by airplane by people who speak English and use Twitter. So it's a very vague approximation of people going from one place to another by airplane, am I right?

In other words you could have gotten something much better by using flight information from travel companies online, using a bunch of factors (like airplane type, route, time/date) to estimate how many people are in each flight. Which would still be of dubious use because we already know how much people transit between which airports.

So basically this new thing is useless in that it only gives a poor approximation of how many people go where, and it's of little relevance to virus spreading anyways, the only reason why it's on Slashdot's front page being the "cool" factor of using data mining on a service such as Twitter and using "epidemiology" as a poor excuse. Or am I missing something?

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[biocute]

Maybe it's more about privacy than epidemic.

Unlike other social networking services, Twitter is a lot more talkative, thus a person is more likely to reveal more information in a more timely manner.

And the timing of information would play a significant part in tracking things.

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[drinkypoo]

am I missing something?

You forgot to shake your tiny, wizened fist and shout "get off of my lawn!"

P.S. Where do you get the information as to how many people fly from which airport to which airport daily?

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[Cassius Corodes]

Plus if I understand this correctly it only looks at the destination and then assumes they went from their hometown. So if you are hopping around someplace it would treat each one as originating from your hometown.

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[Cimexus]

Yes they need to add search strings from other languages. You can see that the vast majority of flights this thing has picked up are US-based. But Twitter is pretty popular all around the world, and people in most other countries travel as much (probably more, actually) than Americans, so I think what we are seeing is purely due the English-only nature of the search strings used.

And yeah ... the data is sorta useless anyway because airports all maintain very accurate statistics of how many people fly into their airport each year, and where from. This data isn't always made public, however.

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[4D6963]

Like I said in the comment to which you replied, "by using flight information from travel companies online". Takes a bit of a guess work to figure how many people it represents but that would be orders of magnitude more accurate than that twitter thing.

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[4D6963]

Privacy? If someone intently shouts to the world "Hear, hear, I just landed in London!" where's the privacy issue?

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[el_flynn]

So it's a very vague approximation of people going from one place to another by airplane, am I right?

From TFA: "Now, I realize this is a far stretch from a working model to predict epidemics. But, it sure does look cool. I also I think it will be a good base for some more interesting work."

Yes, you are right. But I don't think we should be dissing the chap for trying something new. Yes, maybe the the author was trying to up his coolness factor, but kudos to the guy for putting the two disparate pieces of technology together to visualize something about H1N1.

Re:Nothing to do with the virus?

[4D6963]

Convincing? All their flight data is right there online...

Long commute

[4D6963]

According to their representation, the Pacific Ocean either is a no-fly zone, or the Earth is flat. I can't think of any other reason why American flights to Australia would fly above Africa.

Are there REALLY idiots who..

[fluffernutter]

..have nothing better to do but to broadcast their every move to others via Twitter? I just don't get it. Can someone explain it to me?

Do people really feel a need to be hyperconnected at all times? And what I really want to know is, do they broadcast when they take a crap??