[GIS] How to collect tweets outside a given bounding box

apiextentstwitter

I checked the twitter API here.

I know how to get tweets in United States within a bounding box such as:

[-124.47,24.0,-66.56,49.3843].

How can I easily get all the tweets NOT in this bounding box?

Best Answer

Textually from the Twitter API documentation

If you would like to exclude place matches or only include places which fall completely within the bounding box, your code will have to perform an additional filtering step after reading the filtered stream.

Related Solutions

[GIS] Clip Spatial object to bounding box in R

I've created a small function for this very purpose and it has been used by others with good reviews!

gClip <- function(shp, bb){
  if(class(bb) == "matrix") b_poly <- as(extent(as.vector(t(bb))), "SpatialPolygons")
  else b_poly <- as(extent(bb), "SpatialPolygons")
  gIntersection(shp, b_poly, byid = TRUE)
}

This should solve your problem. Further explanation is here: http://robinlovelace.net/r/2014/07/29/clipping-with-r.html

The dummy polygon b_poly that is created has no proj4 string, which results in "Warning: spgeom1 and spgeom2 have different proj4 strings", but this is harmless.

Twitter Geolocation – How to Convert Twitter Tweets into Points?

I found a way using purely Python to get the coordinates for tweets using a word filter. It doesn't seem like many people include location with their tweets.

This might not be what you're after either because this is live streaming data. You can test it by putting a unique filter word and then tweeting that word from your Twitter account. You will see your tweet show up in Python almost instantly. This would be pretty cool to use for some huge event.

You'll need to install Tweepy.

pip install tweepy

And get a Twitter API Key.

Then you can use this script as a template:

import json
from tweepy import Stream
from tweepy import OAuthHandler
from tweepy.streaming import StreamListener

#Enter Twitter API Key information
consumer_key = ''
consumer_secret = ''
access_token = ''
access_secret = ''

file = open("C:\\Output.csv", "w")
file.write("X,Y\n")

data_list = []
count = 0

class listener(StreamListener):

    def on_data(self, data):
        global count

        #How many tweets you want to find, could change to time based
        if count <= 2000:
            json_data = json.loads(data)

            coords = json_data["coordinates"]
            if coords is not None:
               print coords["coordinates"]
               lon = coords["coordinates"][0]
               lat = coords["coordinates"][1]

               data_list.append(json_data)

               file.write(str(lon) + ",")
               file.write(str(lat) + "\n")

               count += 1
            return True
        else:
            file.close()
            return False

    def on_error(self, status):
        print status

auth = OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_secret)
twitterStream = Stream(auth, listener())
#What you want to search for here
twitterStream.filter(track=["Halloween"])

Check out this documentation from Twitter too, it shows what you can put in the filter.

Here's the result of putting the filter as "Halloween" for a few minutes:

enter image description here

And for the hell of it, here's the first 2000 tweets that mentioned Halloween!

http://i.stack.imgur.com/bwdoP.png enter image description here

Happy Halloween!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] Clip Spatial object to bounding box in R

Twitter Geolocation – How to Convert Twitter Tweets into Points?

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