“Holy cow we are in the ghetto,” one East End user writes after they cross over the Ninth Street line. Even more interestingly, many East End users tweeted they were “in the ghetto” while well within the city’s predominantly white and affluent areas. “Ultimately,” the researchers conclude, “these kinds of incongruencies demonstrate the more complex relationship between urban spatial imaginaries and the everyday activity spaces of individuals and collectives as demonstrated through geotagged social media data.” Put more simply: Things are not always as unsophisticated Twitter maps make them seem.
The problem with Twitter maps, then, isn’t that social media data is inherently flawed—it’s that the people who make them get lazy. “[When] you have these giant Twitter datasets … it’s very, very easy to get that view from above and let the data speak for itself and just sort of stop there,” says Poorthuis. “That’s not the right stopping point. You need to contextualize by looking at the data in more detail—the variables and dimensions combined with the local knowledge.”
“It’s 2015 now,” Poorthuis says. “It was cool and an engineering challenge to get these points on a map. But now it’s time to ask deeper and more meaningful questions.”
-Why Most Twitter Maps Can't Be Trusted
[Map: Shelton, Poorthuis and Zook]
