NEW LANDSCAPE MAPS, URBAN AREAS FROM A MICROBLOGGING PERSPECTIVE

Increasingly people use digital or online networks to communicate and interact. They leave messages, distribute news and respond to conversations. The information sent, usually includes the physical location via the GPS of a smart phone. In a sense we are looking at the interface of virtual and real worlds.

The data that forms the basis of this paper is derived from the Twitter micro blogging service. Here users can send any kind information in the form of a 140 character message. The service allows to maintain a pool of followers (friends) with whom one shares the tweets (messages). Practically not everyone will actually receive the message, but technically it is possible to collect every tweet sent via the open API (application programming interface) provided by Twitter.

Form the collected data a new landscape based on density is generated. The features of this landscape of digital activity correspond directly with the physical location of their origin but at the same time represent with hills the peaks of locations from where a lot of messages are sent. The flanks and valleys stand for areas with lesser activity and vast plains and deserts of no tweets stretch across the townscapes. These New City Landscape maps don't represent any physical features, but the interaction with physical features on a temporal basis. The digital realm has become as much part of the urban environment as the physical features and with these tweetography maps they are made visible for the first time. The maps allow us to make a direct comparison between real word activity, physical location and digital message. In a globalised world this local reference develops an increased importance as a sense of place, a source of identity and memory. The digital social media data allows us to investigate into this realm of groups social location interaction, combining the global scale with its local source.