Steam Punk Beta Tweet-O-Meter

Tweet

As regular readers will know our Tweet-o-Meter features tweets per minute within a 30km area of New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Barcelona, Oslo, Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, Moscow and Sydney.

Ben Blundell, here at CASA, has taken some time off from our TOTeM project and has hooked up a series of panel meters to the script via a custom arduino module. The result is a suitably 'steam punk' version of Tweets per minute in New York, London and Paris. We would of hooked up Munich but ran out of meters:

Analog Tweet-O-Meter from Benjamin Blundell on Vimeo.

All it needs now is a brass case and an 'on/off' handle...

Currently in beta and part of our wider 'Ask' tool it allows anyone to 'mine' data from Twitter or carry out a survey of either the world, a continent, a nation, a city or a local area. In short, we think it has notable potential for social science and the analysis of trends and relationships in a variety of areas.

We have run various beta tests on data collection with the main mining process starting next week over a 24 hour period. We aim to collect all tweets with a geo-location tag in the above cities, this is a large amount of data allowing various social, spatial and temporal analysis to be carried out.

The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project being coded by Steven Gray in association with Urban Tick, currently carrying out analysis on the data sampled so far.

See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/ to view the Tweet-o-Meter, we should have some early analysis soon and graphs for the cities within the next day or so. For those too young or perhaps simply nostalgic for the late 70's/early 80's hit that inspired the work, here is PopMusik via YouTube (its great...).

Thanks go to Ben and Steven for their work on this - see Bens http://www.section9.co.uk/, and Stevens http://stevenjamesgray.com/ for more info on their work both inside and outside of CASA time. Thanks also go to Russ Garrett (russ.garrett.co.uk/) and the London Hackspace for help with the code.