Tweets as Pixels in NYC

24 Sep 2014

What do you get when you brighten a pixel every time you get a tweet’s location? That’s what Miguel Rios asked in his post The Geography of Tweets.

Here’s my very own rendering of NYC after gathering geotagged tweets in 2013:

Fascinating deductions:

• The gridded street blocks really pop out because of what I assume are pedestrians tweeting on the sidewalks.
• A lot of people tweet when they drive. Look closely and you can even see all the main bridges (Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, etc).
• The Staten Island Ferry near the bottom of the photo is an incident of tweets being sent over water.

Zooming into Manhattan, we can see the following:

More can be see at New Tweet City. Check out the source code.