Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data

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? This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams – Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. 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’). It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. This seemed perfect, so I signed up for an API key and set to work hooking the APIs up to Processing. Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Timeline Photos - NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration IEEE VIS 2014 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: VAST Papers NEW: Increased exposure and participation through additional Conference-only Papers. Innovative VAST submissions with focuses beyond the scope of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) may be accepted as conference-only papers, in addition to the normal TVCG acceptances (see details below). The IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (IEEE VAST) is the leading international conference dedicated to advances in Visual Analytics Science and Technology. IEEE VAST 2014 will feature an expanded set of accepted papers in two categories. Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces. All deadlines are at 5:00pm Pacific Time (PDT). All three conferences appearing at IEEE VIS 2014 (VAST, InfoVis and SciVis) use the Precision Conference System (PCS) to handle their submission and reviewing process. Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to: