Animated Composite

Ian Guest created an image to visualise the ‘flânerie’ on Twitter. In a second version, Ian creates a gif to show the three layers.

He also documents his thinking:

One of @meteropologeny’s maps was imported into Inkscape and created as a base layer onto which other layers were added.
Tweets were dropped on top of the district blocks. Fitting them to the size and shape of the buildings was possible, but I felt they began to lose their inherent ‘tweetness,’ so left them as simple rectangles. This meant I needed to mask out the underlying buildings …
Which is where the idea for using the Twitter bird came from, although …
It was important as a flâneur not to lose the sense of cityscape, so the next stage brought that back and introduced the different districts or quartiers as ways to categorise the tweets.
As explained previously, these tweets were arranged into different quartiers …
… with the whole street plan reintroduced so one might imagine a walk around the city whilst encountering the kinds of activity seen when wandering the Twitter timeline.
The street names are formed from blog post titles, each street intersecting the quartiers which the contents of the post exemplify.
In the final stage, for simplicity, the tweets are wiped and replaced by illustrative snippets from the blog posts on adjacent streets.

I particularly like Ian’s take on interpretations associated with the various layers. I remember creating a similar thing with transparencies in a project when I was at university.