Just Landed is the latest project by Jer Thorp, an artist from Vancouver, Canada. Built in Processing, Just Landed visualises particular tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. in the form of a 3D geographical map of the world. As phrases are mentioned, the streams of communication are represented.

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams – Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets – some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term “Just landed in”.

Jer Thorp

Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta’s Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time.

Attached below are two clips of the animation. The first one shows approximately 36 hours of Twitter-harvested travel. The other animation shows just 4 hours but running a bit slower.

For more of Jer’s work and other very interesting projects, see blog.blprnt.com