It's not the Chicago of my experience, but almost all of the Chicago of my experience was just that tiny spot at the bottom right.
The curve heading to the southwest seems especially suspect for not corresponding to any particular road or transit line.
Data from the Twitter streaming API (10000 points, 30000 vectors). Base map from OpenStreetMap, CC-BY-SA
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Eric Fischer 16 months ago | reply
Yes, I did go to the U of C.
A set of the same technique applied to other cities
shadowsinspace 13 months ago | reply
Eric - I think you might enjoy this upcoming show I'm in, for real not just plugging cause I'm in it... :)
Natural Networks: Systems of scale, thought & unseen connectivity. Venture into the borderlands of the abstract on.fb.me/Iz3X6u
fhughes88 7 months ago | reply
This map says only that higher SES categories tweet while using transit. It says nothing of demand for transportation.
Eric Fischer 7 months ago | reply
If you look closely, the routes are mostly actually assigned here to major commercial streets, not to the transit lines themselves. Tweeting from transit is a relatively minor component.
You are probably right about low economic status being underrepresented, but I don't think you are right about social status. If you read the Twitter public stream for a while, you can see that US tweeting is dominated by young speakers of stigmatized dialects. You do point out the need to study this bias systematically though.