Idea
Since 2006, millions of users worldwide have been sharing their thoughts and locations via the microblogging service Twitter. Posts on almost every topic can be found there, many of which are tagged with geoinformation. The portal setlist.fm collects information about concerts, involved artists, and songs played.
The two independent crowd-sourcing data sources were combined for the project “Concert Telling Tweets.” The resulting map shows how the concert is reflected in tweets around the event location and provides a mood picture of users' interest in an event.
The system in keywords
Implementation
A web service queries all newly recorded concerts with relevant information from setlist.fm and stores them in a Hosted Feature Service on ArcGIS Online. In parallel, all publicly accessible tweets with geoinformation mentioning the artists of the collected concerts are gathered via the ArcGIS GeoEventProcessor for Server. Only those tweets created on the day of the event or the day after are considered.
Both data sources are queried in real time and stored directly in ArcGIS Online. To limit the amount of data, all tweets older than ten days are automatically deleted.
Interaction of technical components (here: GEP = GeoEventProcessor; AGOL = ArcGIS Online)
Application
The concerts on the map
The JavaScript web client displays all concerts that took place on a selected date within the current map view. The display is refreshable and applicable worldwide. The initial view is chosen based on the browser's geolocation. If this is not provided, Germany is set as the default. On the right, the artists are also listed, which can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency of "nearby tweets" (within a radius of 1000 kilometers from the event location).
Display of tweets related to a concert
By selecting an artist, all tweets related to that artist are displayed on the map alongside the event location. The blue circle marks the area of tweets within 1000 kilometers distance from the event location. Clicking on a tweet on the map displays its content in a pop-up.
The developed JavaScript component is a widget for the configurable ArcGIS Web Application, as exported by ArcGIS Web AppBuilder (currently in beta stage).
You can access the “Concert Telling Tweets” application here. On ArcGIS Online under Concert Telling Tweets, there is also a link to the application and both a German and an English description of it.
Rainer Herzog & Niklas Köhn, Esri Germany
