Over the last few weeks I got in touch with the fascinating field of data visualization which offers great ways to play around with the perception of information.

In a more formal approach data visualization denotes “The representation and presentation of data that exploits our visual perception abilities in order to amplify cognition.

Nowadays there is a huge flood of information that hit’s us everyday. Enormous amounts of data collected from various sources are freely available on the internet. One of these data gargoyles is Twitter producing around 400 million (400 000 000!) tweets per day!

Tweets basically offer two “layers” of information. The obvious direct information within the text of the Tweet itself and also a second layer that is not directly perceived which is the Tweets’ metadata. In this case Twitter offers a large number of additional information like user data, retweet count, hashtags, etc. This metadata can be leveraged to experience data from Twitter in a lot of exciting new ways!

So as a little weekend project I have decided to build a small piece of software that generates real-time heat maps of certain keywords from Twitter data.

This is a first static peek on what it’s gonna look like (apparently the friendly floatees use Twitter, too):



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