title: Geo-Located Tweets. Enhancing Mobility Maps and Capturing Cross-Border Movement.
abstract: Capturing human movement patterns across political borders is difficult and this difficulty highlights the need to investigate alternative data streams. With the advent of smart phones and the ability to attach accurate coordinates to Twitter messages, users leave a geographic digital footprint of their movement when posting tweets. In this study we analyzed 10 months of geo-located tweets for Kenya and were able to capture movement of people at different temporal (daily to periodic) and spatial (local, national to international) scales. We were also able to capture both long and short distances travelled, highlighting regional connections and cross-border movement between Kenya and the surrounding countries. The findings from this study has broad implications for studying movement patterns and mapping inter/intra-region movement dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University, 320 Walker, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, United States of America.
authors.forename: Justine I
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Blanford
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University, 320 Walker, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, United States of America; Centre for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Penn State University, Millenium Science Complex, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, United States of America.
authors.forename: Zhuojie
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University, 320 Walker, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, United States of America.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Savelyev
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University, 320 Walker, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, United States of America.
authors.forename: Alan M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: MacEachren
mesh_terms: D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D040362:Geographic Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D007630:Kenya; D061108:Social Media; D014195:Travel