Geocoding location data with dismo
Today’s Gist could actually end up being very useful to a number of you. It’s something of a trumped-up example, but it illustrates in very simple code how to do three interesting things:
- Gather Tweets by search term (which we’ve done before), and look up user info for each of the users returned by that search.
- Convert textual user location data to approximate latitude & longitude coordinates with the Google geocoding web-service, using a single function, geocode(), from the dismo package. This is a revelation to me, and though there appears to be a daily rate limit, I can imagine so many applications for which this would be useful.
- Very easily plot a world map (albeit with a lame projection), and superimpose points indicating the inferred location of #rstats-Tweeting users.
And all in just 29 (+/-) lines. Truly, truly, we are living in a great era for statistical computing.
