Twitter Activity Timeline as a Signature of Urban Neighborhood

The daily rhythm of geo-tagged tweets turns out to be a fingerprint of what a neighborhood is for.

Kats P, Qian C, Kontokosta C, Sobolevsky S · arXiv preprint, 2017 · Read the paper →

The Twitter cousin of the 311 paper, and the one on this list that I worked the most on. Instead of complaints, the raw material is the daily timeline of geo-tagged tweets across New York: how activity rises and falls through the hours and days in each small area. We turned each neighborhood's timeline into a signature and clustered on it — the same move as the 311 work — to see whether the shape of a day tells you what a place is for.

It does, closely enough to follow a neighborhood as it changes and to estimate socioeconomic measures at a finer time scale than official statistics manage. The same activity stream also let us flag unusual events in space and time. It stayed a preprint, never pushed on to a journal.