Geo-temporal Twitter demographics

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks and uses highly disaggregate social media sources to characterize Greater London in terms of flows of people with modelled individual characteristics, as well as conventional measures of land use morphology and night-time residence. We conduct three analyses. First, we use the Shannon Entropy measure to characterize the geography of information creation across the city. Second, we create a geo-temporal demographic classification of Twitter users in London. Third, we begin to use Twitter data to characterize the links between different locations across the city. We see all three elements as data rich, highly disaggregate geo-temporal analysis of urban form and function, albeit one that pertains to no clearly defined population. Our conclusions reflect upon this severe shortcoming in analysis using social media data, and its implications for progressing our understanding of socio-spatial distributions within cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• geo-temporal demographics
• urban geography

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to Mike Batty for helpful ideas and comments, and to the anonymous referees for their detailed feedback.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/J005266/1] and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [ES/L011840/1].