I've built several visualizations with static data. I wanted to experiment with real-time data. I follow PDX Police Log on Twitter, which is a police scanner feed. I thought this was pretty interesting, so I wrote a persistent listener that uploads these Tweets to a database. An open socket connection updates this data in realtime.

I use Mapbox to generate the chart. Mapbox is really great- it's feature-rich, great documentation, and free to use for projects like this. You may have noticed that the Twitter account provides the address of the event. I use Mapbox's geocoding tool to convert the address to latitude and longitude and then create the markers on the map using the latitude and longitude. The tool is not always successful - they tweet out a few different address formats and some formats are easier to parse and geocode than others. In particular, address formats of 'STREET 1 / STREET 2' rarely return correctly.

Update: 3/15/2023

Unfortunately, Twitter has made the decision to no longer allow developers to freely interact with their API, so this project no longer functions as intended.