Communications of the ACM
Surveying African Cities Using Twitter
Researchers using Twitter to amass data on economic and other activity in developing countries initially focused on Nairobi, Kenya, a city with a diverse population of more than three million.
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Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) working on the Afrotech Future Africa Initiative are using Twitter to help determine quantitative information on economic activity, population counts, and other measures in developing countries.
The researchers focused on Nairobi, Kenya, a city with a diverse population of more than three million inhabitants, seeking to develop ways to make sense of the data generated by Twitter users.
"While each individual message, each tweet, may contain only trivialities, analyzed in large numbers, they can reveal potentially interesting information," says EPFL researcher Darshan Santani, who developed a website that visualizes geo-localized tweets sent from Nairobi.
Tweets collected over a three-month period appear as dark red dots lining the main roads that lead into Nairobi. Meanwhile, word clouds present the most frequently used words at various locations on the map, showing how the use of social media varies across the city.
"Our goal is to get all the labs on board whose work would be advanced by having access to this and other data sources, for example, to better understand the spread of infectious diseases or how a city's limits evolve over time," says Afrotech director Jonathan Ledgard.
From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
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