International Student World Map Based on Tweets

Today we’re releasing a 3D globe that highlights where international students want to study abroad. You can check it out right here! You will need a browser that supports WebGL to see it live in 3D (Google Chrome!) or you can continue reading on to find images and a video.

What is This?

The globe shows students around the world expressing their intent to study abroad. Each little dot on the globe represents a student based on where they are located.

A white dot represents a student that wants to study in Australia.
A red dot represents a student that wants to study in Canada.
A green dot represents a student that wants to study in New Zealand.
A purple dot represents a student that wants to study in the United Kingdom.
A blue dot represents a student that wants to study in the United States.

When a large number of responses were located in the same area, the magnitude of the line appears taller. This is clearly seen in heavily-densed but small geographic areas, such as Singapore, Seoul, and New York.

The data was acquired by analyzing the content of tweets throughout the month of January. For example, a student in Germany who posts a message about how she wishes she could study abroad in Australia would be indicated by a white dot at her location in Germany. Any messages referring to their home country were excluded (that’s why there are no blue dots in the U.S. or purple dots in the U.K.).

The map was generated by utilizing the WebGL Globe, an open-source platform for visualizing geographic data created by the Google Data Arts Team. WebGL is a new web technology based on HTML5 and JavaScript that allows rendering of beautiful 3D graphics in a browser.

Here is a video of the globe if you don’t have Google Chrome installed.

Interesting Trends

Since the data was collected from Twitter’s Streaming API, you can see how certain parts of the world use Twitter more than others. Western Europe, Japan, and North America are heavy consumers of Twitter while Africa and certain countries in Asia are not. Twitter has been blocked in China since 2009, but you can still see users in Hong Kong and Taiwan using the service.

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia

The data shows that the U.S. and the U.K. still remain very popular destinations for international students. The blue and purple dots easily outnumber the rest of the colors. The lure of the United States is felt throughout most of Europe, East Asia, and South America. Canada is generating a lot of buzz in India while Australia is attracting a lot of interest from students in neighboring Southeast Asia. Feel free to add your own observations!