New city landscape - Mapping urban Twitter usage

The micro blogging platform Twitter is actively used by millions of people. By using the geo tags of the messages sent a virtual landscape of online activity at a certain place is generated to visualize the interface between the real-world location and the virtual activity. These New City Landscapes (NCL) visualize the amount of activity as density surfaces with hills, peaks and valleys. Across a set of different cities from around the world the resulting landscape morphologies are compared and characterized as types. This article focuses on temporal narratives and how they travel through the urban fabric via the virtual landscape in different cities around the world. The findings are discussed as cross comparisons according to activity in time and space.