*Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter* by Kalev H. Leetaru, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Anand Padmanabhan, and Eric Shook. /First Monday/, Volume 18, Number 5 - 6 May 2013 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654 doi:10.5210/fm.v18i5.4366 URL: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654 Abstract In just under seven years, Twitter has grown to count nearly three percent of the entire global population among its active users who have sent more than 170 billion 140--character messages. Today the service plays such a significant role in American culture that the Library of Congress has assembled a permanent archive of the site back to its first tweet, updated daily. With its open API, Twitter has become one of the most popular data sources for social research, yet the majority of the literature has focused on it as a text or network graph source, with only limited efforts to date focusing exclusively on the geography of Twitter, assessing the various sources of geographic information on the service and their accuracy. More than three percent of all tweets are found to have native location information available, while a naive geocoder based on a simple major cities gazetteer and relying on the user--provided Location and Profile fields is able to geolocate more than a third of all tweets with high accuracy when measured against the GPS--based baseline. Geographic proximity is found to play a minimal role both in who users communicate with and what they communicate about, providing evidence that social media is shifting the communicative landscape. *Contents* Introduction <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p1> The native geography of Twitter: Georeferenced tweets <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p2> The linguistic geography of Twitter <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p3>

From text to maps: The textual geography of Twitter <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p4> Accuracy and language <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p5> The geography of communication on Twitter <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p6> The geography of linking disccourse <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p7> User profile links <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p8> Twitter versus mainstream news media <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p9> Twitter's geography of growth and impact <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p10> Conclusions <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p11>