Author: Adam DuVander

The pulse of the planet beats through Twitter, where a cross-section of the world shares what’s on their minds. As we celebrate Valentine’s Day, let’s listen into a few of those hearts through a simple hashtag. We grabbed a sampling of tweets including the #love hashtag over a 36 hour period, then filtered down to those that sent geographic coordinates. The result is this map of sentimental moments all over the globe.

View 36 Hours of #love Map in a full screen map

From Canadians missing family to Australians at the beach (it is summer down there), everyone is sharing their love for something or someone. Even though these are all tweets, they’re also Instagram photos. The popular pic-sharing app makes it really easy to geocode your shots, as well as share on Twitter, so it’s no surprise to see it show up in our #love data.

Some of these stories of love are explained within the text itself. Others are a little slice of mystery. For example, it’d be fun to know the story behind how a picture from a flight was plotted in northern Canada—someone didn’t put their device in airplane mode, I guess. Or, how is there only one tweet from San Francisco? Perhaps the tech industry is over hashtags, or love, or both.

Map Your Own Twitter Search

With thousands of tweets every second, this map likely didn’t catch every single #love tweet, but we gathered nearly 7,000 over a day and a half. Most of these tweets did not have the precise location embedded, but many are still mappable. Here’s how you can make your own Twitter Search Map:

1. Install the Twitter Archiver plugin for Chrome
2. In a new Google Spreadsheet, go to the Add-ons, choose Twitter Archiver, then Create Search Rule
3. Add your search criteria—there are a lot of potential options.
4. Click the Start Tracking button.

After giving access to your Twitter account (it won’t post anything), you’ll start getting data in a new sheet Twitter Archiver creates. You’ll get a lot of results at first, then start receiving up to 100 per hour. It keeps working even with your computer off or the spreadsheet closed.

Now you have a spreadsheet with tweets matching your search term. BatchGeo does a great job of converting spreadsheets to maps, so grab the columns of the data that you want to include on your map.

If a tweet has a precise location, you’ll see a “Map” link in the last column of your spreadsheet. To retrieve the latitude and longitude requires either some manual effort or coding on your part, unfortunately. You can see in the image that by double-clicking a Map cell, embedded within are geographic coordinates.

Alternatively, you can use the location column to let BatchGeo perform the geocoding. It’s not as precise, since it will map whatever the user has as their location in their bio, but it’s still an interesting look at tweets by place. Also, you’ll likely have much more data this way.

No matter what type of data you have, from Twitter or from your hard drive, we hope you #love BatchGeo. If you haven’t checked us out yet, create a map today.

We all want to eat healthy, but usually that includes things like fresh vegetables and less processed food. You can add restaurants with clean floors to that list. Perhaps thWe all want to eat healthy, but usually that includes things like fresh vegetables and less processed food. You can add restaurants with clean floors to that list. Perhaps that’s an obvious requirement, but a kitchen’s cleanliness is rarely apparent to patrons. That’s why health departments in many localities have frequent inspections, with the results available to the public. It’s not always so easy to find and view a restaurant’s score, but plotting this open data on a map using BatchGeo can expose problem places near you.

View Chicago Health Code High Risk Failed Inspections in a full screen map

That’s what we did with Chicago’s health department records, available on its open data portal. We loaded all 2,500 high risk failed inspections into BatchGeo, allowing Chicagoans to gain some insights from making the data geographically browsable.

Look for Overall Trends

Our map automatically tries to show all the data at once. Since the 2,500 markers would be dense and overlapping, by default BatchGeo enabled the map clustering option. While that can be disabled, it’s useful for gaining a glimpse of the data below. For example, we can tell that in most neighborhoods about half of violations were due to canvassing, the periodic inspections performed by the health department. About 15-20% come directly from complaints and about the same number are found when applying for a license.

You can also mix and match the grouping fields to get additional insights. Just use the menu in the lower left to select a field and one or more values. For example, you might be more interested in day care and other children’s facilities than restaurants. Select Facility Type from the grouping menu, then click the three types that correspond to those places. Now switch the grouping to Inspection Type and you’ll only see the data for day cares. Here we can tell that, for this type of facility, license and canvassing make up an even great portion of the violations.

Find Nearby Health Code Violations

You’re more likely to eat near where you live or work. Every BatchGeo map optionally includes a store locator feature to find your closest plotted point on the map. Let’s say you live at Wrigley Field, 1060 W Addison St. Put the address into the search bar in the upper right of the map. You’ll be taken to the three violations in 2015 at the stadium itself, which has a number of food vendors.

Or let’s say you’re President Obama going home to Chicago. Plot in his family’s address at 5046 South Greenwood Avenue and you can see Windy’s Deli had some issues with refrigerator temperature.

How We Found the Data

The City of Chicago Data Portal has hundreds of available datasets, updated regularly. One of its most popular is the food inspections data we used, which contains every single inspection from 2010 to now. In addition to failed inspections, you’ll find every check that passed, as well as every level of risk. In our map, we only show high risk failed inspections from 2015. We didn’t have to crunch that data ourselves, the Chicago data portal allows us to filter the data.

We employed three different filters to get the data we needed. First, we included start and end dates for the inspections—January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2015. Next, we only wanted results that included a Fail. Finally, we wanted the risk to be high, to weed out leaky faucets and other low risk findings that also result in failing a health inspection. Finally, there’s an option to export the filtered data in a number of formats, including a CSV for Excel, which we can easily turn into a BatchGeo map.

Find Your Own City Data

This map and data works great if you live in Chicago. What about if you live somewhere else? Your local health department likely makes its records available online. You might also check with Socrata, the company whose software powers Chicago’s site, as well as several others. Socrata maintains this list of public data portals, itself powered by Socrata.

You’ll find other ideas, including mapping Wikipedia lists, in our guide to mapping open data.

In the United States, one way Martin Luther King is remembered is by celebrating his birthday every January. King also factors heavily in many Black History Month programs at elementary schools in February. But in many other ways, the civil rights leader is remembered throughout the year. These two maps follow King’s life and one way his presence is felt within over 150 cities in the United States: with a street bearing his name.

View Martin Luther King, Jr. Timeline in a full screen map

Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute compiled a chronology of major events, from 1929 (his birth) to 1968 (his death). We’ve pulled out geographic-specific events and included imagery where useful.

You’ll find the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of King’s earliest political movements. Of course, the March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, is one of several events located in the capital city.

Much of the major events are located in the southern United States, including King’s native Georgia and nearby Alabama. When it comes to the other map, there is also plenty of southern representation. But it’s clear King’s legacy extends beyond one region of the country.

View Streets Named After Martin Luther King in a full screen map

This map contains 169 streets in 165 cities (New York City, Cleveland, and San Diego show up multiple times) all named after Martin Luther King, Jr. From San Francisco to Boston, and many cities in-between, there is at least one representative street in all but 12 states.

North Carolina leads the way with 20 streets named after King. Florida has 15, and Texas 13. Mississippi is the only other state with double digit representation, with 10. King’s home state of Georgia has six. Alabama only has three—Mobile, Scottsboro, and fittingly, Selma.

Since it’s a rarity to add entirely new streets to cities, most of which were changed from previous names. You can click each marker to find the background, derived from Wikipedia. Over a third (56) of these streets are named “Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.” Another 41 cities went with “Drive” instead. Others are “Ways,” “Streets,” “Avenues,” and “Parkways.” There are five “Expressways,” three “Freeways,” and one “Bypass.”

No matter what you call these dedications, it’s a small but fitting tribute to King’s legacy. Explore these BatchGeo maps as an interactive history lesson through a medium you might typically think of for driving directions.