Eric Fischer, known around these parts for his detailed dot maps, describes his process along with a code release.
I’ve been tracking geotagged tweets from Twitter’s public API for the last three and a half years. There are about 10 million public geotagged tweets every day, which is about 120 per second, up from about 3 million a day when I first started watching. The accumulated history adds up to nearly three terabytes of compressed JSON and is growing by four gigabytes a day. And here is what those 6,341,973,478 tweets look like on a map, at any scale you want.
I’ve open sourced the tools I used to manipulate the data and did all the design work in Mapbox Studio. Here’s how you can make one like it yourself.
Three main steps (not including data collection): filter out noise and duplicates, generate map tiles, and style to your liking.
