London Riots on Twitter 9 Aug 2011

Map Type: MapTubeD descriptor map

Data location: http://www.maptube.org/DataDrop/DataDropService.svc/37/aa6e3fbf-3fae-4020-95c5-7f980cc09574/data

Uploaded by: richard

Created: 10/08/2011 13:38:15. Viewed 5632 times. Last Viewed: 17/04/2024 19:53:04

Keywords: twitter london riots cleanup

Brief Description

This map shows UK tweets from 15:00 to 22:00 on Tuesday 9 August 2011. The colour code shows whether they contain hashtags relating to the riots, cleanup or whether they are just general tweets. Click on the point to see the tweet message

Detailed Information

The data for this map was compiled by collecting geocoded tweets in the UK area between 15:00 and 22:00 BST on Tuesday 9th August 2011. There are some gaps in the time coverage due to collection problems and the Twitter API only gives a percentage of the full Twitter feed and not all tweets contain geocoding information. The data was processed by extracting the #londonriots, #ukriots or #riots tags, the #riotcleanup tag and @riotcleanup.

This was then coded into one of four states as follows: 0=general tweet with no riot tags, 1=tweet containing one of the three riot tags and no cleanup tag, 2=tweet containing one of the two cleanup tags and no riot tag, 3=tweet containing both riot and cleanup tags. The colourscale reflects the coding with blue=general, green=cleanup, red=riot and yellow=both.

The map is clickable, so it's possible to see the usernames and messages being sent around the areas where riots were happening.

In total, 34,314 tweets were collected, of which 1,330 contained a riot hashtag and 87 contained a cleanup hashtag. It was noted in the data that the hashtags #nottinghamriots, #manchesterriots and others were being used which would not have been counted as riot tags.

For the purposes of collection, the UK area is taken as being within the following bounding box: (-6.37,49.95), (1.86,60.84) (WGS84).

The data for this map was collected using Steven Gray's Twitter tools, which were also used to build the real-time London 2012 #1yeartogo map for the London Olympics. Further information on mining data with twitter can be found on his website at the following address:

http://bigdatatoolkit.org