In this post I’ll be covering the following tools. I will be assuming you have some knowledge of them, but in case you don’t, here’s where you can learn more about each.
Google Drive: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2424384?hl=en
Google Sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/49008?hl=en
Google Fusion Tables: https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/2571232?hl=en
IFTTT.com
cartodb.com
Twitter.com
My first thought was to use IFTTT.com to populate a Google Spreadsheet of users using the #GISTribe hashtag on twitter with their locations. Unfortunately, IFTTT doesn’t have a location option, but they’ve assured me they’ll look into it.
Then I came across this video demonstrating a Google Spreadsheet Add-on.
As you can observe, the result includes Profile locations! As you can also see, some people are more general than others, and some get downright creative as we all tend to be. We’ll see what Google comes up with.
Now I’ll add here someone mentioned trying this in CartoDB. I’m not as familiar with it, but I gave it a shot anyway with their Twitter connector. The location result I get from there is a bit of a surprise. Both Emily and Rachel are from Boulder, CO, but Emily is showing near Las Vegas and I can’t find any data that justifies it. The actor_location is a coded result which I might be throwing off the georerferencer, but again, I’m no expert. I am wondering if maybe instead, they’re somehow pulling where the twitter user started his/her account? Emily did live in Arizona for a while, so maybe that’s it?
My next attempt was to connect the Google Spreadsheet into CartoDB. After a couple tries at geolocating the Location column, I’ve concluded that they have more stringent requirements that this dataset just cannot meet as is.
So that leaves me with starting up a new Fusion Table where you have the option to import a Google Spreadsheet. Fusion Tables tries to guess column types based on the data. I just needed to click the Location header option and change the Type to location. After adding a Map tab, Fusion Tables takes a few moments combing the Location column to georeference a location. While doing so, it shows a meter showing how inaccurate it considers the location results to be. It ran 10-15% inaccurate.
I wanted to narrow it down to those who tweeted #GISTribe on one particular day planning on applying this for GIS Day. i chose the previous week’s chat day, Nov. 11.
Now one down-side I should mention is that there isn’t a time slider, and there isn’t feature count unless you want to do some spreadsheet manipulation ahead of time to account for this. (You may not be familiar with Google Spreadsheets, but in my experience, if you have Excel experience, you’re already 95% of the way. They way they work and their formulas are frequently the same that moving from one to the other is nearly seamless in its workflow.)
So the result is that every location can only hold one tweet at a time and thus, one user. So even though Emily and Rachel are both in Boulder, CO, Emily is the only one shown. This isn’t ideal.*Now we could run an array and get a count of each location, but that would give us a “Tweets from” value, not “Users from” value. Both insightful, but I prefer “Users from”. Adding another sheet and removing duplicate user names can get me there, but I’ve run out of time.
I’ve published what I’ve ended up with at maps.gistri.be despite its obvious flaws. I can try working it out a bit more, or perhaps you have a better tool you can suggest. Either way, I hope this has provided at least something helpful. We’ll tag this #WIP for Work In Progress.
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Google Drive: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2424384?hl=en
Google Sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/49008?hl=en
Google Fusion Tables: https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/2571232?hl=en
IFTTT.com
cartodb.com
Twitter.com
My first thought was to use IFTTT.com to populate a Google Spreadsheet of users using the #GISTribe hashtag on twitter with their locations. Unfortunately, IFTTT doesn’t have a location option, but they’ve assured me they’ll look into it.
Then I came across this video demonstrating a Google Spreadsheet Add-on.
Now I’ll add here someone mentioned trying this in CartoDB. I’m not as familiar with it, but I gave it a shot anyway with their Twitter connector. The location result I get from there is a bit of a surprise. Both Emily and Rachel are from Boulder, CO, but Emily is showing near Las Vegas and I can’t find any data that justifies it. The actor_location is a coded result which I might be throwing off the georerferencer, but again, I’m no expert. I am wondering if maybe instead, they’re somehow pulling where the twitter user started his/her account? Emily did live in Arizona for a while, so maybe that’s it?
My next attempt was to connect the Google Spreadsheet into CartoDB. After a couple tries at geolocating the Location column, I’ve concluded that they have more stringent requirements that this dataset just cannot meet as is.
So that leaves me with starting up a new Fusion Table where you have the option to import a Google Spreadsheet. Fusion Tables tries to guess column types based on the data. I just needed to click the Location header option and change the Type to location. After adding a Map tab, Fusion Tables takes a few moments combing the Location column to georeference a location. While doing so, it shows a meter showing how inaccurate it considers the location results to be. It ran 10-15% inaccurate.
I wanted to narrow it down to those who tweeted #GISTribe on one particular day planning on applying this for GIS Day. i chose the previous week’s chat day, Nov. 11.
Now one down-side I should mention is that there isn’t a time slider, and there isn’t feature count unless you want to do some spreadsheet manipulation ahead of time to account for this. (You may not be familiar with Google Spreadsheets, but in my experience, if you have Excel experience, you’re already 95% of the way. They way they work and their formulas are frequently the same that moving from one to the other is nearly seamless in its workflow.)
So the result is that every location can only hold one tweet at a time and thus, one user. So even though Emily and Rachel are both in Boulder, CO, Emily is the only one shown. This isn’t ideal.*Now we could run an array and get a count of each location, but that would give us a “Tweets from” value, not “Users from” value. Both insightful, but I prefer “Users from”. Adding another sheet and removing duplicate user names can get me there, but I’ve run out of time.
I’ve published what I’ve ended up with at maps.gistri.be despite its obvious flaws. I can try working it out a bit more, or perhaps you have a better tool you can suggest. Either way, I hope this has provided at least something helpful. We’ll tag this #WIP for Work In Progress.
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