Study Shows How Useful Twitter Data Can Be for Planners

As Larry Felton Johnson explains, the data in a recent study are "useful in urban planning, because it gives a good sense of what large groups of people are doing from hour to hour in a specific city or region." According to the the atlantalarry post, planners should be able to see the broader impacts of specific information. Although the study "mentions night life in particular, where the data might give guidance into allocation of resources for cleanup and noise mitigation."

The study, titled "Spectral clustering for sensing urban land use using Twitter activity," is by Enrique and Vanessa Frías-Martínez, brother and sister computer science researchers at Telefonica Research and the University of Maryland (USA), respectively.

The Science Daily post about the study includes this quote from Enrique Frías-Martínez explaining why the use of data crowd-sourced from Twitter might improve traditional forms of community engagement employed by planners: "you can capture information on urban land use more efficiently and for a much larger number of people than with questionnaires. Moreover, this type of consultation, traditionally used until now in planning activities, are very costly and can cause problems due to the lack of accuracy of the answers."