Twitter location-based data: evaluating the methods of data collection provided by twitter api

Twitter data analysis is an emerging field of research that utilizes data collected from Twitter to address many issues such as disaster response, sentiment analysis, and demographic studies. The success of data analysis relies on collecting accurate and representative data of the studied group or phenomena to get the best results. Various twitter analysis applications rely on collecting the locations of the users sending the tweets, but this information is not always available. There are several attempts at estimating location based aspects of a tweet. However, there is a lack of attempts on investigating the data collection methods that are focused on location. In this paper, we investigate the two methods for obtaining location-based data provided by Twitter API, Twitter places and Geocode parameters. We studied these methods to determine their accuracy and their suitability for research. The study concludes that the places method is the more accurate, but it excludes a lot of the data, while the geocode method provides us with more data, but special attention needs to be paid to outliers.