Examples: Searching Twitter by location and with specific keywords

Using geocodes to filter tweets based on location is what locative media geeks refer to as setting up a geofence. Here are some example geofences and their twitter search strings.

Tweets from Capitol, Jan 6

Following a speech by Donald Trump telling people to go to the Capitol and disrupt the electoral vote certification, many people did. Some of them were using Twitter.

Entering the search string below let’s you use twitter location search to see their tweets:

geocode:38.890550,-77.009017,.02km

geocode:38.890550,-77.009017,.02km

since:2021-01-05 until:2021-01-07

Example: Tweets about Hurricane Sandy in Vermont

One of the specific ways that geocoded Twitter searches get used is during emergencies and weather events. The challenge with using Twitter to monitor these kinds of things is that people use a variety of relevant terms–some official, some folksonomic, some just random relevant words. Here is an example of a geocoded search string for following Vermont tweets related to the Sandy storm of late October 2012: -RT -election power OR #vtsandy OR #vtresponse OR #frankenstorm OR sandy OR flood geocode:43.913723261972855,-72.54272478125,150km This search eliminates retweets that include the “RT” customary signal and include a variety of word markers. I’ve eliminated the word “election” as well to keep the search focused on things which are immediately important in an emergency environment. You’ll notice from the image that, since Vermont isn’t a very round state that we’ll be pulling in Twitter posts from some of the areas around Vermont as well. Also note that in addition to hashtags this twitter location search filter also includes the words “power” and “flood” in case people are tweeting about those words but don’t know about hashtags etc.

Example: NYC Hurricane Sandy Twitter search

This is pretty much the same as the Vermont search above but is instead set to cover New York City.

-RT -election power OR #sandy OR #frankenstorm 
OR sandy OR flood OR surge 
geocode:40.714353,-74.00597299999998,20km

Example: Tweets with #BTV hashtag OR #BVT hashtag within 200km of Burlington, VT (Vermont, Montreal, Quebec, Upstate NY and some NH)

Sometimes you want to do an either or kind of search. For example, in Burlington Vermont there are two hashtags which get used: #BTV and #BVT.

Some people use both, some people use only one. If you want to merge those streams and limit by geography, use this search string. Note, that this technique will work with any of the other search strings as well.