Some Twitter Search data

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I just ran a backsearch using Twitter Search with a geo focus of a circle of radius 210 km around the epicenter of the quake. This gets the westernmost tip of Haiti, but includes some of the Dominican Republic. Eventually I'll be coding the Streaming API version of this, but there aren't enough geotagged tweets yet to make it worth doing.

What did I get? 7500 tweets total - the earliest was from "Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:46:12 +0000". I don't know if that's because Twitter wasn't functional before that or for some other reason. Twitter Search normally goes back at least a week, and it can go back longer. Of those 7500 tweets, only 93 were geotagged. I've left the data in JSON format, UNIX line endings. I have a script that converts them to CSV, but it needs to be enhanced to include the geotagging data when it exists. I'm in no hurry to do that, since my understanding is that the various projects are directly integrating Twitter data. The file is

http://github.com/znmeb/Twitter-API-Perl-Utilities/blob/master/haiti_quake_backsearch_collected_data.json

It's about 3.7 megabytes.

I also got a list of tweet counts for all the users represented in the search result. If a user is in this list, they either sent a geotagged tweet from inside the search circle, or Twitter thinks their profile location is inside the search circle. That file is

http://github.com/znmeb/Twitter-API-Perl-Utilities/blob/master/haiti_quake_backsearch_tweet_counts.csv

There are 579 users in that list. That's not a horrendous number to expect human curation on at this stage of the game, and if anyone so desires, I can pull their profiles into a spreadsheet and even download their most recent 3200 tweets. ;-)

Please feel free to forward this to anyone you thing would be interested. I'm going to see if anyone on the main "CrisisMappers" mailing list has an interest.

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net

"I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God." ~Alan Hovhaness