The Catalan Way, shaping a V following Barcelona's main avenues, is clearly visible on a map by plotting geolocated tweets. The demonstration on occasion of the Day of Catalonia was called for 5:14 pm, today September, 11. This study has been performed by a team of researchers specialized on social network analysis at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems composed by Antònia Tugores, José Javier Ramasco and Pere Colet.
The researchers have downloaded tweets geolocated at the area of Catalonia and has represented them on a map. Tweets are downloaded without any a priory filtering on the basis of hashtags or keywords. The data has no post-processing.
They have also collected the same data on the previous day to establish a baseline for comparison. In this sense it is interesting to note that the tweets per hour in the area of Catalonia has doubled going from about 1000 on the previous day to above 2000 today afternoon. Significantly, most of this increase occurs in Barcelona where it has gone from 500 to 1500.
Hourly maps show how tweets become concentrated around the avenues selected for the demonstration even an hour before the official starting time (5:14 pm).
As an example, the attached map shows the tweets from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm.
More information:http://ifisc.uib-csic.es/
This study is being carried out in the context of one of the IFISC resarch line that has as an goal the analysis of human mobility in urban environments and can be considered as an exaple of how social events influence and activate mobility.