Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data

Just Landed - Screenshot

I have a friend who has a Ph.D in bioinformatics. Over a beer last week, we ended up discussing the H1N1 flu virus, epidemic modeling, and countless other fascinating and somewhat scary things. She told me that epidemiologists have been experimenting with alternate methods of creating transmission models – specifically, she talked about a group that was using data from the Where’s George? project to build a computer model for tracking and predicting the spread of contagions (which I read about again in this NYTimes article two days later).

Just Landed - Screenshot

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams – Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets – some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

Just Landed - Screenshot

The idea is simple: Find tweets that contain this phrase, parse out the location they’d just landed in, along with the home location they list on their Twitter profile, and use this to map out travel in the Twittersphere (yes, I just used the phrase ‘Twittersphere’). Twitter’s search API gives us an easy way to get a list of tweets containing the phrase – I am working in Processing so I used Twitter4J to acquire the data from Twitter. The next question was a bit trickier – how would I extract location data from a list of tweets like this?:

Queen_Btch: just landed in London heading to the pub for a drink then im of to bed…so tired who knew hooking up on an airplane would be so tiring =S
jjvirgin: Just landed in Maui and I feel better already … Four days here then off to vegas
checrothers: Just landed in Dakar, Senegal… Another 9 hours n I’ll be in South Africa two entire days after I left … Doodles

It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. MetaCarta offers 2 different APIs that can extract longitude & latitude information from a query. It can take the tweets above and extract locations:

London, London, United Kingdom – “Latitude” : 51.52, “Longitude” : -0.1
Maui, Hawaii, United States – “Latitude” : 20.5819, “Longitude” : -156.375
Dakar, Dakar, Senegal – “Latitude” : 14.72, “Longitude” : -17.48

This seemed perfect, so I signed up for an API key and set to work hooking the APIs up to Processing. This was a little bit tricky, since the APIs require authentication. After a bit of back and forth, I managed to track down the right libraries to implement Basic Authorization in Processing. I ended up writing a set of Classes to talk to MetaCarta – I’ll share these in a follow-up post later this week.

Now I had a way to take a series of tweets, and extract location data from them. I did the same thing with the location information from the Twitter user’s profile page – I could have gotten this via the Twitter API but it would cost one query per user, and Twitter limits requests to 100/hour, so I went the quick and dirty way and scraped this information from HTML. This gave me a pair of location points that could be placed on a map. This was reasonably easy with some assistance from the very informative map projection pages on Wolfram MathWorld.

I’ll admit it took some time to get the whole thing working the way that I wanted it to, but Processing is a perfect environment for this kind of project – bringing in data, implementing 3D, exporting to video – it’s all relatively easy. Here’s a render from the system, showing about 36 hours of Twitter-harvested travel:

Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

And another, earlier render showing just 4 hours but running a bit slower (I like this pace a lot better – but not the files size of the 36 hour video rendered at this speed!!)

Just Landed – Test Render (4 hrs) from blprnt on Vimeo.

Now, I realize this is a far stretch from a working model to predict epidemics. But, it sure does look cool. I also I think it will be a good base for some more interesting work. Of course, as always, I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

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77 Comments

  1. Jesse
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 8:08 am | Permalink

    Jer, this is gorgeous!

    I'd like to see it built into an App that allows live UI tag filtering to be entered, then dynamically updated. Could be great as an installation or performance tool.

  2. Jer
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 1:51 pm | Permalink

    Thanks, Jesse.

    This actually renders totally fine in real time – but the data harvesting takes a long time, since it has to make a query to MetaCarta twice for every tweet. Ideally I’d like to move this process server-side, and have a PHP script that takes care of harvesting the data, etc. That way you’d be able to use the interface to explore historical data, etc.

    -Jer

  3. Posted May 11, 2009 at 6:10 pm | Permalink

    This is great. I love the way the arcs have that leading pulses. I could see this being useful for visualising not just transmission of flu but also other data that moves over time for example weather.

  4. Jer
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 8:56 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for all of the comments. I'll respond in more detail when I get a chance – but suffice to say I appreciate all of your suggestions & questions.

    Right now what you are seeing is 'away' pairs – where they are arriving somewhere that isn't their home location. I'd like to add the 'home' pairs – people who are landing at home, but I'm not sure how I want to represent these graphically, yet.

    A lot of people were quick to find the 2D weakness – cross-pacific flights are not shown properly. I like the suggestion that this might be due to a no-fly zone or a sea monster – but really it's because I opted for the 2D map to avoid the typical spinning globe visualization cliché. I think the 2D map works well for a lot of reasons – I might eventually try a globe version but I don't think so.

    Two things to keep in mind here:

    1. This is a sketch of a project that I don't consider final in any real way

    2. I am not intending to produce a real simulation of air travel – there are lots of better ways to do that. As I said int he post, I'm interested in exposing hidden information in Twitter feeds. I'm also interested in the possibilities (when implemented by much smarter people with a lot more time) of this kind of concept to real modeling.

    In any case, I'm glad that people seem to be enjoying these early steps – and I welcome any and all comment and feedback.

    -Jer

  5. mkehrt
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 9:49 pm | Permalink

    Interesting.

    It looks like most of the arcs in the US go west to east. I’m wondering why this is. It’s possible you collected data during times when flights are mostly west to east, such as coast to coast redeyes? Although it’s 36 hours of data. Or maybe there’s a bug in your renderer? Also, it’s possibly a vast majority of twitter users are west coasters.

  6. Ron
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 10:30 pm | Permalink

    What about layovers, return trips, long trips, people in the military?

  7. Posted May 11, 2009 at 11:09 pm | Permalink

    Nice visualisation!

    You can get Lat/Long information from USGS:

    http://geonames.usgs.gov

    Barry.

  8. BenS
    Posted May 11, 2009 at 11:13 pm | Permalink

    I notice that all the arcs start in the west and move to the east. This would seem to imply an assumption in the programming that the target left its home location to arrive at ‘just landed in’. Also the direction of movement may be biased by Twitters user base being mostly North American. Too much inferred by this exercise to really tell much about the actual movement of the twitter targets.

  9. Posted May 11, 2009 at 11:56 pm | Permalink

    As someone just noted on Slashdot, you’d better re-implement it as a globe with better distance calculation. Great thought it is, as it stands, the Pacific Ocean is either a no-fly zone, or the world really *is* flat!

    Is great though. If only people would twitter more accurate information so (for instance) if someone’s flying from one location to another and neither is their home, it’ll still “work”.
    Awesome work, nice to see Processing getting some press. Be sure to let the guys at Processing know about this, they’ll find it just as cool as I do.
    Nice one!

  10. Posted May 12, 2009 at 12:07 am | Permalink

    Very clever! I’m a Vancouverite myself. Question – why is it that we see so many outgoing flights but I don’t think I recall seeing even a single flight heading IN to the U.S?

  11. Dan
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 12:41 am | Permalink

    It’s possible that people are less likely to post something immediately after returning from a trip abroad as they simply want to get home and unpack and relax. To get those results it might be necessary to look for “just got back from…”

    However, that would lead to *tons* of results not being international flights and instead be things like, “the movies” or “grandma’s house”. What it boils down to is that mining social networking sites for interpreted data in very dependent on the language that is used to describe different situations and circumstances and also in looking for the right phrases.

  12. Posted May 12, 2009 at 12:56 am | Permalink

    Finally, after over a decade of drinking beer together, we come up with something good. This is much, much better than candlelight croquet and the resulting lawn fire.

  13. alex
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 1:53 am | Permalink

    It's pretty cool but it is too US centric as you would expect from twitter. I don't think it would make a very accurate model for the spread of a virus.

  14. jbl
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:59 am | Permalink

    Tres cool. What a way to visualize data.

    How about sound effects? I hear some sort of up-sliding tone or whoosh for a takeoff, and a downward one for landing (nothing for mid-flight, though); have the pitch / frequency be higher for shorter trips.

  15. Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:59 am | Permalink

    This is a really, really cool visualization. My mind is swirling with the possibilities.

    Really, really great stuff. I shared this with my entire staff. Thank you for taking the time to post. I for one, would love more insight into how specifically you generated this from a code perspective if you’re willing to share. :)

    All the best,
    Jonathan

  16. runicNomad
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:23 am | Permalink

    brilliant idea here

  17. Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:58 am | Permalink

    At first, i thought it was too much “traffic” (in both senses) coming from the US, but then i realized, it had to do with the language being parsed. The US would still lead in Twitter-using, but i think if you tried parsing different languages, the whole thing would spread a little more..

    To get more data, one could analyse the usage of google, with complete statistics such as ip-address and possibly set cookies, you could easily find out, where people are going if they were working off of their laptops..

  18. Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:59 am | Permalink

    oh, and i second Jonathan Lambert. More detail about the code in question would be nice.

  19. Posted May 12, 2009 at 4:36 am | Permalink

    Really cool piece of work!

    I just wonder what would happen if you were able to take data from travel sites like expedia.com and others as the input for your model.

    Best Regards,
    Victor

  20. Posted May 12, 2009 at 5:17 am | Permalink

    Another suggestion: Just /arrived/ in…

  21. luca
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 6:45 am | Permalink

    Otstanding, Jer!!!

    Not only cool idea, but also very nice visualisation.

  22. Tom
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 7:04 am | Permalink

    Another issue to consider is the west-coaster who makes a stop on the way to Europe — your model as built would show an LA-NY flight, plus a LA-London flight. I suppose it would take a bit of work to correlate “just landed in” with prior entries from a user, rather than just his home location.

  23. Posted May 12, 2009 at 8:01 am | Permalink

    Hi Jer,

    That is absolutely amazing. I’ve a proposal for you regarding working on a slightly different data source for this visualisation that would provide for a much more compelling real time visualisation. Please do feel free to drop me an email (its on the form, I assume you can see it) if you’d like to discuss.

    cheers
    David

  24. Brian Sanford
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 8:21 am | Permalink

    You should consider storing user names and locations for two weeks or so in the final product. That way, in the case of jjvrigin or someone else who is traveling multiple places. You could have it plot from their last “just landed in location” rather than from their listed home location. Not entirely a necessity, but if you want to create a tool to predict epidemics accurately, you are definitely going to want to include that information. Plus, this would help out with the return home plot. The search for lets say, “just got home” or “its good to be home”, or something to that effect, could then have the name extracted and compared the user list. You then have the last location and could easily get the home location.

    Either way, very cool project and by all definitions quite brilliant. Who could have thought, Twitter made useful? I never thought I’d see the day.

  25. Posted May 12, 2009 at 8:27 am | Permalink

    A lot of my friends and business associates just say “LAX to DFW” as their Facebook updates (indicating that they are flying to Dallas from LA). I wonder if you could dig out some good data points using that kind of tagging.

  26. studog
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 8:55 am | Permalink

    You assume that people have flown directly from their home location to their “just landed in” location. I think that’s a very big assumption that’s only true a fraction of the time.

    What about people taking multiple flights throughout a vacation? I’ve travelled that way before. What about people who drove somewhere else first, then flew? Business travel?

  27. Posted May 12, 2009 at 9:33 am | Permalink

    This is really cool. Keep up the good work. It looks amazing and I really like the concept!

  28. Posted May 12, 2009 at 12:15 pm | Permalink

    Jer,

    This is phenomenal! From the side at the end it looks almost exactly like a strange attractor – I guess that fractal function is a matter of the distribution of airline travel consumption. Have you considered Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection? You’d see all travel moving up and down across a plane of nearly continuous landmass.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

  29. Tonya E
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 1:14 pm | Permalink

    Even given various smart questions about what’s being tracked and what it means, I think the visualizations are beautiful. They definitely got the creative, “what-if”? side of my brain working.

  30. Thierry
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:13 pm | Permalink

    Exiting

  31. Thierry
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:16 pm | Permalink

    Beautiful, curious , funny project.
    I should be happy if you plan to produce a shareware or why not a toool able to vizualize the Internet traffic in 3D; I presume that many people should be interested in this product.
    Good luck with your project.

  32. Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:12 pm | Permalink

    Reminds me a bit of DEFCON actually.

  33. Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:17 pm | Permalink

    Fantastic.

    Have you considered doing something similar with “I am sick” and “I feel sick” – each entry could have a radius, and overlapping results could create increasing color gradients – similar to a storm on a weather radar.

  34. Jer
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:45 pm | Permalink

    Thanks again for all of the comments. A lot of other people have done great work visualizing network traffic, airline traffic, etc. In this project I was most interested in using data that people didn’t necessarily intend to share.

    Once things calm down a bit (thanks /. !) I’ll sit down and build a version with some of the excellent suggestions that have come out of this thread and the Vimeo thread.

    And yes, I do intend to release source for this project – who needs $$$ anyways??

  35. Jer
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 4:01 pm | Permalink

    PopeOnABomb – what you are talking about has already been done very very well by Jonathan Harris with http://wefeelfine.org

  36. Jer
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 4:03 pm | Permalink

    Ryan – Dymaxion would be a great idea – certainly cool to try. I’ll have to see if I can dig up the formulas.

  37. Posted May 13, 2009 at 9:01 am | Permalink

    Awesome stuff there, truly awesome.

  38. Name withheld
    Posted May 13, 2009 at 11:33 pm | Permalink

    As an epidemiologist at the CDC (who has colleagues currently dispatched to work on the Swine Flu, this is really valuable information. What an incredible dramatization too, I’ll pass it on.

  39. Oscar
    Posted May 14, 2009 at 6:03 am | Permalink

    Nice job. Hope in the future geolocation services such Latitude bring public anonymized data. All this information will increase the self-knowing of the humanity.

  40. Posted May 14, 2009 at 8:14 am | Permalink

    What a great idea!

    I just posted on your vimeo page http://vimeo.com/4587178 about doing this kind of visualization for “http” searches in the twitter API to get recently mentioned Web pages and using the MetaCarta GeoTagger to plot the locations mentioned in those Web pages.

    MetaCarta also has a search API that you can use to find recent news articles that mention places near any place — perhaps you could use that to add a “word cloud” to each landing site. “Just landed in… Wellington” would then generate “05/02/2009 06:58:00 A Wellington woman who tested positive for Influenza A (H1N1) after arriving in Auckland from Los Angeles on NZ1 on …”

    Let me know if you want any help filtering with the APIs.

    We love what you’re doing.

    jrf

  41. Posted May 18, 2009 at 12:30 am | Permalink

    beautiful.

  42. Al
    Posted June 1, 2009 at 9:01 am | Permalink

    Processing source code? :D It’s truly too pretty not to be released!

  43. dvoinik
    Posted June 3, 2009 at 5:12 pm | Permalink

    Amazing work Jer! Which were the two Metacarta APIs you used? And how were you able to get the black and white map? Keep up the great work!

  44. Posted June 30, 2009 at 1:02 pm | Permalink

    Woww, you’re on Twitter’s Trending Topics, kudos
    Indeed Gorgeous Twitter!! =)) Keep it up. Let us know when you release this awesome app

  45. Posted June 30, 2009 at 1:49 pm | Permalink

    Hello Jer, this is beautiful!

    If you want we could do a sound track for the movies, for free. They are lacking it.

    You have my e-mail, just get in touc if you are interested.

    Cheers,
    Fernando

  46. Posted July 1, 2009 at 2:47 pm | Permalink

    All I can say is awesome! I am thrilled with the direction I see discussed here. Maybe there is hope when people start thinking. Many great uses for this, keep up the excellent creative genius. This is brilliant!

  47. Posted July 1, 2009 at 2:48 pm | Permalink

    As you can see from my last post I mucked up on my url…lol sorry about that. Thanks

  48. Posted July 7, 2009 at 5:14 am | Permalink

    Lovely idea with elegant solution. =)

    Keep up with the good work!!

  49. Posted July 12, 2009 at 1:30 am | Permalink

    Beautiful

  50. Posted July 12, 2009 at 2:04 am | Permalink

    Why assume that they are travelling from their Twitter home location? I realize that you lack a choice, but that's gonna skew the results for multi-city travellers, and the “just landed in” crowd are likely pre-selected for that bunch of people.

  51. blprnt
    Posted July 12, 2009 at 2:53 am | Permalink

    Hi Bruce,

    First – this very quick project was meant as a proof of concept and was never supposed to be an accurate model of any kind. There has been some interest from the epidemiology community, though, so perhaps it might become something more accurate.

    Second, you're right. I think an ideal solution would track back into a user's tweets to try to guess what their itinerary may have been. I don't think that this would be extraordinarily difficult, but would certainly involve a fair number of hits to the Twitter API.

    In any case, thanks for your comments.

    -Jer

  52. Posted July 19, 2009 at 10:34 pm | Permalink

    Amazing…I would like to know how integrate the API with Processing.

  53. Posted September 21, 2009 at 5:56 pm | Permalink

    Very cool way to track this information. While the data could potentially be skewed a bit due to various possibilities, it's got good potential.

  54. Posted February 14, 2010 at 2:50 am | Permalink

    Ich konnte sehen, dass dies nicht nur zur Visualisierung Übertragung von Grippe, sondern auch andere nützliche Daten, was sich bewegt im Laufe der Zeit zum Beispiel Wetter.

  55. Posted April 29, 2010 at 7:01 pm | Permalink

    Excellent post. Thank you. As one who comes from a Library Science background, it's encouraging to see the use of such "tools" as RDF outside of the traditional library environment. In fact, the use of controlled vocabularies such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is another example of how traditional information organization tools and techniques are being applied to new technological and information discovery challenges. However, all keep to the same concern of helping people find the right information at the right time, a concern that has concerned librarians for centuries. I will wait for next same post

  56. Posted June 11, 2010 at 11:26 am | Permalink

    junk

  57. Posted July 25, 2010 at 6:15 pm | Permalink

    For accurate results you would have to filter out the many misspellings and txt garbage which we see so much of these days. Corruption of the English language etc….

  58. Posted July 25, 2010 at 9:36 pm | Permalink

    I am curious as to whether there would be a way to query tweets that are asking for a particular product or service and what that query might look like..?? It would be cool to be able to tweet them back with a link to what they are looking for!

  59. Posted August 4, 2010 at 11:39 pm | Permalink

    This is crazy! I love how you can checkout the location of tweets! nice one :)

  60. Toon
    Posted August 5, 2010 at 8:30 pm | Permalink

    Very nice.
    May i ask where you got that world map from?

  61. Desert Safari dubai
    Posted August 13, 2010 at 10:09 am | Permalink

    Man!You are a genius. I come from Kenya and internet penetration is only about 25%. But we are working on raising that figure. People are slowly warming up to twitter back here and local mobile developers are thinking of apps that can utilise the power of twitter for local apps and content generation.

    What you have done here is amazing.I would also like to know how you implemented this from a code perspective.

    Great work and thankyou for beaming out the light of knowledge.

  62. Posted August 13, 2010 at 10:15 am | Permalink

    What you have done here is amazing. I come from Kenya and Internet penetration back here is around 25% but we are working on increasing that figure. People are slowly warming up to twitter and its potential more so local mobile application developers in generating mobile apps and content generation.This info could really come in handy.

    I would also like to know how you implemented this from a code perspective.

    Thank you for beaming the light of knowledge to us.

  63. Posted September 17, 2010 at 2:53 pm | Permalink

    Totally rad video. Great work. If you need some cool sound effects to go along with this, I could be willing to donate. Feel free to get in touch.

  64. Carpet
    Posted September 25, 2010 at 2:37 am | Permalink

    Just Landed is the latest project by Jer Thorp, an artist from Vancouver, Canada. Built in Processing, Just Landed visualizes particular tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. in the form of a 3D geographical map of the world. As phrases are mentioned, the streams of communication represented.Data and text mining boffins like to crunch “big data.” The idea is that the more data one has, the less slop in the wonky “scores” that fancy math slaps on certain “objects.” Individuals think that his / her actions are unique. Not exactly. The more data one has about people, the easier it is to create some conceptual pig pens and push individuals in them. If you don’t know the name and address of the people, no matter. Once a pig pen has enough piggies in it (50 is a minimum I like to use as a lower boundary), I can push anonymous “users” into those pig pens. Once in a pig pen, the piggies do some predictable things. Since I am from farm country, piggies will move toward chow. You get the idea.

  65. rahul
    Posted November 19, 2010 at 11:35 pm | Permalink

    To get more data, one could analyse the usage of google, with complete statistics such as ip-address and possibly set cookies, you could easily find out, where people are going if they were working off of their laptops..

    sim only blackberry

  66. raptortech97
    Posted November 28, 2010 at 9:50 pm | Permalink

    Is this project intended to show how much people reveal on Twitter, track flights, or track disease?
    For the first, this is awesome.
    For the second, I would suggest scraping HTML from airlines' flight info.
    For the third, I suggest tracking each user, and trying to figure out where they are and have been and if they are sick.

  67. moushate12
    Posted December 20, 2010 at 10:28 am | Permalink

    This is as frightening as it is awesome.

  68. travel home
    Posted January 27, 2011 at 4:08 pm | Permalink

    ive already seen it and have to say i think its really great. Like most of your work you always got the right ideas how to use different apis in the best possible way.

  69. Andres
    Posted April 3, 2011 at 1:28 pm | Permalink

    It's very cool, i don't think usa is the center of the world, but in the neo european-american culture it is, i belive that the creators of this maravellous video are extremly influenced by that consumist-capitalist culture.
    Great Job!

  70. waterbaker
    Posted May 9, 2011 at 8:57 pm | Permalink

    This is beautiful! A stunning idea and an equally stunning visualization.

    Landing in a new place is always more exciting than coming back to your own country, so I would expect people to give the former more mentions. In any case, one can see that longer distances (across the globe) are mentioned more than the shorter ones (within the country)

    What if the map was portrayed as a rotating globe and not a plane? Would it be as interesting?

    It would be great if you can monitor the movements a few days before important global events and create specific videos for the same. Like the Olympics, World Cup, the Copenhagen Summit, Commonwealth games, G8 summit, etc.

    Keep up the wonderful work. Looking forward to more.

    Regards,

    Arushi

  71. robin
    Posted May 19, 2011 at 4:04 am | Permalink

    Please give me points on how to achieve this in general. I need do sth. related to geo maps with 3D vis

  72. Amber
    Posted August 23, 2011 at 10:24 am | Permalink

    To the modeler:
    You did this little experiment a long time ago….but I wonder what would happen if you try to search the equivalent of "Just landed…" in other languages (French, Mandarin, Japanese, German, etc…) Maybe you will be able to represent a more global sense of travel. Or maybe there are just more American users posting about their travel?

    To get "return home" flights, maybe you could write some code that would review previous posts of twitterers who return a result where the "Just landed…" destination = twitter hometown. There is a good chance that they reference places they were visiting. For example…someone from NYC returns to NYC. If they were in London….maybe 8 days prior they said "Just landed in…London" or they posted "@Big Ben in London" during their trip. Might be an interesting way to try to harvest the data and infer where the trip originated.

    To readers:
    As the modeler wrote, this is a very cool visualization, but the orange arcs are not true flight paths. Travelers from SF to Australia generally do not cross all of Africa and Asia (they cross the Pacific).

    The data collection excludes flights that represent people returning home. The data modeler assumed the start location was the twitterer's listed home town. For example If someone said they landed in New York City (perhaps from London) AND have New York City listed as their hometown, we will not see their London –> NYC trip because his model will only read "NYC (twitter hometown) –> NYC ("landed in…" destination).

  73. Posted October 30, 2011 at 5:37 pm | Permalink

    @kelownagurl A couple of users (early Twitter adopters) encountered such an error. Basically the API call hangs instead of returning data.

  74. Posted December 14, 2011 at 8:10 am | Permalink

    Really cool piece of work!

    I just wonder what would happen if you were able to take data from travel sites like expedia.com and others as the input for your model.

  75. Posted February 15, 2012 at 5:49 pm | Permalink

    Jer – this is great stuff, I am a geographer at The Nature Conservancy and I'm looking for a compelling way to visualize the connectivity and migratory routes of birds. There's a fairly large citizen science database of observations (with location) available from ebird.org. Nonetheless if this sounds interesting to you I'd love to chat about it. Nice work!

  76. lighters
    Posted February 24, 2012 at 12:23 pm | Permalink

    Really, really great stuff. I shared this with my entire staff. Thank you for taking the time to post. I for one, would love more insight into how specifically you generated this from a code perspective if you're willing to share. :)
    buckle

  77. diana
    Posted March 18, 2012 at 2:20 pm | Permalink

    Hi Jer, what a wonderful visualization!!!
    I have a technical question. How did you get the 3D like visualization? (the flat map with the arcs) I'm trying to use unfolding lib + peasy cam lib but i have some error placing the coordinates. Any recommendation? Thanks!

59 Trackbacks

  1. [...] Just Landed extracts travel information from Tweets and maps the journeys on a map. The map itself remeains two dimensional but the “flights” are visualized in as three dimensional  curves. A chronological order of the Tweets makes it possible to review a certain time period. [...]

  2. By Just Landed | blacksundae on May 11, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    [...] Link. Via http://waxy.org/links/ Tags: facebook, processing, programming, social networking, travel, twitter, visualization Posted by Shannon on May 11th, 2009 Filed in Animation, Nerdy, Science, Technology [...]

  3. By botykai_zsolt (Zsolt Botykai) on May 11, 2009 at 11:38 pm

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    Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data [link to post] from: @blprnt #cool

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  4. By jennifergardy (Jennifer Gardy) on May 12, 2009 at 12:57 am

    Twitter Comment


    I raise epidemiology point over beer last week, my smarty friend rolls with it, and its Slashdotted! @blprnt Just Landed: [link to post]

    – Posted using Chat Catcher

  5. [...] Jer Thorp has harnessed the internet’s oversharing tendencies for good, compiling 36 hours worth of [...]

  6. [...] Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data (blprnt) [...]

  7. By links for 2009-05-12 at DeStructUred Blog on May 12, 2009 at 10:03 pm

    [...] Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg (tags: twitter socialmedia blog visualization travel research maps processing) [...]

  8. [...] Hay más detalles de todo el proceso en Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data. [...]

  9. [...] Jer Thorp has harnessed the internet’s oversharing tendencies for good, assembling 36 hours worth of [...]

  10. By Just landed | written by Ardy Heijnekamp on May 13, 2009 at 5:46 am

    [...] Just Landed is a great twitter visualization extracting travel information from Tweets and maps the journeys on a map. The application looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time. more info here via infostethics [...]

  11. By The Graphient Blog » Meet Jer Thorp on May 13, 2009 at 7:17 am

    [...] Awesome. Find out more about his methodology and check out some animation here. [...]

  12. [...] describes his work in detail on his blog. But all you really need do is click the videos below to watch tweeters in [...]

  13. [...] describes his work in detail on his blog. But all you really need do is click the videos below to watch tweeters in [...]

  14. [...] naheliegende Übung, wie sie z.B. rivva.de vollführt. Der kanadische Medienkünstler Jer Thorp hat nun Reisen von Twitter-Usern visualisiert – inspiriert von den Modellen, mit denen die Ausbreitung von Seuchen vorhergesagt [...]

  15. By links for 2009-05-14 « Amy G. Dala on May 14, 2009 at 10:04 am

    [...] Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg (tags: twitter geolocation) [...]

  16. By Infovore » links for May 14th on May 14, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    [...] Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful. (tags: data informatics twitter visualisation processing mapping socialmedia ) [...]

  17. By Post launch busi-ness « Flink Labs on May 14, 2009 at 11:33 pm

    [...] interactive “map” has some real promise. Starting to play with Adobe Flex Admiring the “Just Landed” work from Jer Thorp, especially the process he took. Listening to Bat for Lashes Visiting the NGV for the John Brack [...]

  18. [...] the “Just Landed” work from Jer Thorp, especially the process he [...]

  19. By links for 2009-05-18 « links and tweets on May 18, 2009 at 8:12 pm

    [...] Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg "Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data" – blprnt.blg http://tr.im/lCpJ [from http://twitter.com/kenmat/statuses/1831572517 (tags: tweecious Twitter UnitedStates Hawaii TheNewYorkTimesCompany Applicationprogramminginterface Facebook&Twitter OntheWeb PHP) [...]

  20. By 36小时环游地球Twitter村 - 牛也博客 on June 5, 2009 at 2:37 am

    [...] 艺术家Jer Thorp 制作了一个漂亮的视频,向人们展示了Twitter 上36小时之内信息在世界范围内的传递。 [...]

  21. By Semantic Monkey » Yahoo! Placemaker on June 6, 2009 at 2:22 am

    [...] there’s almost no location based application I can’t build. Indeed sites such as Just Landed which searches Twitter for the text ‘just landed in’ and geocodes the places in order [...]

  22. [...] comes almost a month after Vancouver-based digital artist blprnt created a video that visualises the flight journeys of thousands of Twitter users by scouring the [...]

  23. By Just Landed – Twitter | Flight Wisdom on June 19, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    [...] those of you interested, an artist in Vancouver has created animations showing the flight paths of Twitter users, using the search term “Just Landed [...]

  24. [...] Jer Thorp describes on his blog the experiment of mapping Twitter arrivals status updates containing the phrase “just landed”. Jer writes: “The idea is simple: Find tweets that contain this phrase, parse out the location they’d just landed in, along with the home location they list on their Twitter profile, and use this to map out travel in the Twittersphere…” [...]

  25. By 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations on June 30, 2009 at 9:46 am

    [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks out for the location they’d landed in, and the location they were sent from, and show all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  26. [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks out for the location they’d landed in, and the location they were sent from, and show all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  27. [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks out for the location they’d landed in, and the location they were sent from, and show all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  28. [...] 6 gorgeous Twitter visualizations — There are a lot of really cool ways to visualize Twitter and all its tweets, but my favorite might just be Just Landed: Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog,blprnt.org. [...]

  29. [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  30. [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  31. [...] landed in…” heeft hij inzichtelijk kunnen maken hoe mensen de wereld overvliegen. Lees hier meer over zijn [...]

  32. [...] with my friend Jennifer Gardy, whose insights into epidemiology and data modeling led me to build Just Landed. Jennifer is currently working at the BC Centre for Disease Control where, among other things, [...]

  33. [...] siguiente de la lista es Just Landed, que no deja de ser una prueba de concepto, pero hay que destacar la espectacularidad con que se [...]

  34. [...] siguiente de la lista es Just Landed, que no deja de ser una prueba de concepto, pero hay que destacar la espectacularidad con que se [...]

  35. By Map- Reaction Post 8 « Marci Green on July 17, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    [...] like a tourist in their new city. The other map that I thought was pretty cool to look at was the Just Landed Map. I thought the idea about taking social network information streams pretty crazy, as I was one of [...]

  36. [...] is a very similar system to the one I used for Just Landed – the only real difference here is that the locations and travel paths are mapped onto a [...]

  37. [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  38. [...] Of course, all of this information can be useful for the good guys, too. With millions of people active on Twitter, the store of data – and what it can reveal – gets more and more interesting every day. We are already seeing scientists using web data to measure public happiness, but I think we have just scraped the surface of what could be uncovered. (To see a model of how Twitter updates could be used to track travel and disease spread, see my post on Just Landed). [...]

  39. By Gravity in a Box | Rob Barry's Blog on August 16, 2009 at 2:45 am

    [...] after discovering Processing, I completely forgot about it. Yesterday, I saw this guy’s blog, and also a preview of what Google Chrome can do with [...]

  40. By 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations @ cash tower on August 17, 2009 at 8:46 pm

    [...] Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog, blprnt.org. [...]

  41. By Good morning! tweets | The Fuel Blog ® on August 24, 2009 at 10:04 am

    [...] anuncian los buenos días en diferentes idiomas, a lo largo del planeta. El padre de la idea es Jer Thorp, que ya había hecho anteriormente otro experimento similar con las palabras “Just [...]

  42. [...] that displays over 11,000 tweets collected within a 24-hour period (similar to his 'just landed' one a while back).  Different colours represent different times the phrase 'Good [...]

  43. By GoodMorning! | blprnt.blg on August 24, 2009 at 7:46 pm

    [...] It began as a quick idea that emerged out of the discussions following my post about Just Landed, in which several commenters asked to see a global version of that project. This would have been [...]

  44. [...] sociais. Muitos dados úteis podem estar escondidos em meio a informação não estruturada. O Just Landed é um experimento de visualização de dados que utiliza o Twitter para visualizar o trafego de [...]

  45. By Just Landed « STEADY Labs on August 28, 2009 at 7:40 pm

    [...] artist and educator Jer Thorp used a smart mix of tools. Read more here. [ via infothestics [...]

  46. By STEADY Labs — Blog — Just Landed on August 31, 2009 at 5:36 pm

    [...] artist and educator Jer Thorp used a smart mix of tools. Read more here. [ via infothestics ] swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf", "vvq-248-vimeo-1", [...]

  47. [...] Just Landed представляет собой симпатичную гео-визуализацию твитов, содержащих фразу “Just landed in…”. Данный сервис ищет все записи с данными словами, определяет местоположение пишущего пользователя и отображает его на 3D карте мира. Чтобы узнать больше о сервисе Just Landed, вы можете прочитать блог разработчика – blprnt.org. [...]

  48. By Flashpitt ‘09 « city creative on September 26, 2009 at 7:09 pm

    [...] or twitter– using processing.  A couple of his recent projects include NY Times 365/360 and Just Landed. There’s lots more speakers,too. You can see the full list here: [...]

  49. By FlashPitt 09 « Pittsburgh Art + Technology on October 12, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    [...] Pittsburgh’s conference for interactive designers, developers and artists returns for a second year after last year’s sold out event. When: October 15 & 16th 2009 Where: Sheraton Station Square, 300W Station Square Dr., Pittsburgh, PA 15219 Flashpitt is a conference for interactive designers, developers and artists. It is the only event of it’s kind in Pittsburgh and it’s running for a second year to follow up last year’s sold out event. Flashpitt brings international industry leaders right here to Pittsburgh to benefit the region’s interactive community. These renowned designers, developers, and authors will share inside tips, new technologies and industry insights with attendees. Highlights from this year’s speakers list include Seb Lee-Delisle and Jer Thorp.  Seb is from Brighton, UK and will be speaking on his work, including: the Pyro for the People installation and a cutting edge 3D web site for the BBC.  Jer, coming from Vancouver, BC, will speak about his art created with open data sources — like the New York Times database and twitter– using processing.  His recent projects include NY Times 365/360 and Just Landed. [...]

  50. [...] http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metacarta-hidden-data The idea is simple: Find tweets that contain this phrase, parse out the location they’d just landed in, along with the home location they list on their Twitter profile, and use this to map out travel in the Twittersphere Categories: Uncategorized Reacties (0) Trackbacks (0) Plaats een reactie Trackback [...]

  51. [...] Just Landed by Jer Thorp [...]

  52. [...] Fast schon gruselig – Reisenotizen von Twitter-Nutzern wurden dank API von Jer Thorp visualisiert. Mehr Info: Klick. [...]

  53. [...] Along with the three I mentioned above Peter Elst’s talk on Freelancing and Jer Thorp’s talk entitle ‘Hacking the Newsroom’ was really interesting especially his work with Twitter in a project called Good Morning and Just Landed. [...]

  54. [...] out that showed people’s tweets that contained the words “just landed” on a map? Guess what used to build that?[Via: Nokia PR] Share this: /**/ Related News from IntoMobileThere is only one way someone can [...]

  55. By Why VGI needs a new name « oegeo on October 27, 2010 at 11:47 am

    [...] The previous examples, OpenStreetMap, Waze, TomTom MapShare, all deal with contributions that are unambiguously geographic. The contributions users make to those platforms, volunteered or no, explicitly contain a coordinate or two (or more). In the larger domain of social information live many instances of citizen-contributed information that was most likely  not consciously intended to be geographically interpreted – but it still is. The pretty geo-visualization to your right is a fine example. It is a visualization of tweets like “Just landed in SFO”. When someone send out a tweet like that, spatial information is implicit rather than explicit. Still, the massive volume of information shared though this social platform, combined with a certain degree of predictability of the human mind, can be leveraged to visualize worldwide air travel patterns with relatively little effort. [...]

  56. [...] opinion. Recently it’s been used by researchers for applications as diverse as visualizing travel information and daily variations in moods to predicting elections. It’s been lauded for its ability to [...]

  57. [...] VIA: Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg. [...]

  58. [...] Jer Thorp has harnessed the internet’s oversharing tendencies for good, compiling 36 hours worth of [...]

  59. By theJSJ » AnIntroductionToProcessing » theJSJ on March 1, 2012 at 12:07 pm

    [...] http://jmartinho.net/digitalArt-html5/index.php?art=tr-lines http://www.thegreeneyl.com/mit-media-lab-identity-1 http://vimeo.com/22955812 http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metacarta-hidden-data [...]

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