Language Communities of London as seen by Twitter

October 25, 2012 3:31 AM

London's Twitter Languages. Twitter Languages of the World.
posted by Gordafarin (14 comments total)

For those with a truly academic interest, a conference about Twitter, including linguistic aspects, next April. I'm imagining now the tweets by the conference attendees, perhaps discussing a talk about tweets by conference attendees...
posted by knile at 4:08 AM on October 25, 2012

Is there any way to make the Fischer image bigger? Even clicking on the image itself in his photostream leaves it maddeningly too small to read.
posted by Kitteh at 5:33 AM on October 25, 2012

Here's the full size.
posted by Gordafarin at 5:49 AM on October 25, 2012

Unless you are better than I am at distinguishing shades of red, the color scheme isn't always very helpful. German and Turkish are red, so the large Turkish minority in Germany, if it is indeed tweeting in Turkish, is invisible. And Polish is red, so it looks like Germany's neighbor Poland also tweets in German, unless you start with Poland, in which case maybe you wonder why all of Germany is tweeting in Polish.
posted by pracowity at 6:48 AM on October 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

This is great fun, I never knew about the lost tribe of Russians south of Dalston.
posted by Damienmce at 7:52 AM on October 25, 2012

Eric Fischer did the world-wide map linked here that inspired the London map. He's a prolific visualizer / artist and really deserves a FPP or three on his own; here's a profile on him. He publishes all his work to his Flickr account and to full size. Flickr's UI is maddening, but if you right click on the image there's a menu option for "original" that shows them in all their glory.

James Cheshire's London map is nice; clever to focus on one city. I'd like to see it with the English tweets removed entirely, sort of like subtracting the background radiation.
posted by Nelson at 7:55 AM on October 25, 2012

Baku, Azerbaijan is a small explosion of varied colors.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:18 AM on October 25, 2012

Apparently he selected the colours according to proximity so that may have something to do with the problems you're describing, pracowty.
posted by infini at 8:24 AM on October 25, 2012

Zoom.it version of the world map.
posted by rh at 9:33 AM on October 25, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sorry about the colors! I did the best I could, pushing the colors further apart around the color wheel if the languages were used near each other or pulling them closer together if they didn't conflict.

I don't know why Turkish and German didn't get pushed apart. I need to go back and look at that again, but it may have been that the number of Turkish tweets in Germany was small relative to the other conflicts that needed to be resolved with German and Turkish. There just aren't enough colors to go around.
posted by enf at 10:29 AM on October 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

You did a fine job. We're all enjoying it.
posted by pracowity at 10:39 AM on October 25, 2012

One solution might be to let people choose their own colors interactively. Default = black, then choose a certain set of languages with a different color for each, and then generate a display.
posted by pracowity at 10:42 AM on October 25, 2012

I like pracowity's pony request.
posted by infini at 12:30 PM on October 25, 2012

Geoffrey Chaucer Coined 'Twitter'
posted by homunculus at 6:50 PM on October 25, 2012