I was discussing H1N1 with a bioinformatics friend of mine last weekend, and we ended up talking about ways that epidemiologists model transmission of disease. I wondered how some of the information that is shared voluntarily on social networks might be used to build useful models of various kinds.

I'm also interested in visualizing information that isn't implicitly shared - but instead is inferred or suggested.

This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...'. 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.

I'm not entirely sure where this will end up going, but I am reasonably happy with the results so far.

Built with Processing (processing.org)

You can read more about this project on my blog - blog.blprnt.com