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Colors of Twitter

Generate language maps out of Twitter data

Sample image

This is a set of scripts that let you generate language maps from Twitter data.

Nor the maps nor the data themselves are provided here, the idea is that you can generate them yourself with the instructions below.

Initial setup

Collecting data

First you will need some data. Let this run for a while:

npm run collect

This will be collecting and analysing around 1,000 tweets per minute, adding the results to the database collection determined by your environment variables DATABASE_URL, DATABASE_NAME and COLLECTION_LOCATIONS.

Of course, the more tweets you get, the better. You can speed things up a bit (up to 3,000 tweets per minute) by decreasing the environment variable MIN_TWEET_LENGTH, at the expense of the reliability of the language detection.

You can kill the process and resume later, the new data will just be aggregated to the old one. This can also be run on a remote setup like Heroku + mLab so that it's running continuously without intervention.

You can run npm run stats at any point to get some statistics.

Generating maps

As PNG

npm run png

You can pass some optional parameters to define the image width in pixels (otherwise the value from the WIDTH environment variable will be taken) and/or a longitude/latitude bounding box:

npm run png -- --width=1000 --box=-27,72,45,34

Aliases for the bounding box can also be set in ./src/bounding-boxes.json:

npm run png -- --width=1000 --box=europe

As GeoJSON

This will generate a GeoJSON map that can be shown with mapping tools like LeafletJS or Mapbox. It's a more sophisticated approach that requires heavier geometric calculations and can take quite longer:

npm run geojson

Excluding languages from the map

You can set languages to be excluded in the EXCLUDE_LANGUAGES variable in your environment (this will affect both PNG and GeoJSON maps):

EXCLUDE_LANGUAGES=eo,ia,ie,tlh,la,xx-Qaai

Alternatively, when generating PNG maps you can override this setting by passing an --exclude parameter:

npm run png --exclude=en,ja,es

Artificially limiting language boundaries

If you want to manually fine tune your maps, one way to do it is to apply boundaries to languages. You can do that by adding the corresponding GeoJSON file under ./lib/fences.

An easy way yo do it is to draw the corresponding shapes using a service like geojson.io and copy-paste the result to a JSON file named after the language code, just like the existing en.json file that you can see.

I am applying this technique to the English language to compensate that it's used so much on the Internet; but personally I have preferred to not go further with this in other languages, as this could get really tricky really quickly.

You can bypass this feature altogether when generating PNG maps by passing a --raw parameter:

npm run png -- --raw

License

AGPL v3