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  • Using the Twitter application programming interface [44], we retrieved, depending on the date, 1% to 15% of public tweets from 19 November 2009, the first day that tweet coordinates were provided, to 20 December 2012. Due to data collection issues, there were missing days in the collection period but only days that were complete were considered in the data analysis, resulting in 839 days analysed. The dataset was then filtered for conversational tweets (replies) posted from the United Kingdom. The list of tweet IDs analysed in this paper was deposited on figshare (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1249692) The message of each filtered tweet was extracted by removing all leading @usernames, and leading and trailing whitespaces of the remaining text. Leading whitespaces were not removed when the message length was measured in terms of the available space because some tweets do not use whitespaces to separate the @usernames with the message. Messages with a length, in characters, of zero or greater than 140 (maximum allowed length of tweets) were then discarded resulting in a total of 3,443,773 tweets posted by 372,783 users, suitable for analysis by region. The length of messages in words was determined by calculating the number of chunks after splitting the message by whitespaces. The posting location of a tweet was determined by using its geo, coordinates and place metadata (geotags), where these fields were considered in this order. Tweets were then assigned to individual districts based on boundary data provided by the UK Ordnance Survey. Tweets that only have place information were considered to be from UK if the country attribute of place was United Kingdom. The centroid of the bounding_box attribute, if it existed, were then used to determine the districts. Otherwise, the tweet was assigned to the name of the place if the place_type was city or admin. A tweet with no coordinates and only England as its place was excluded because the location information was too coarse to determine if it came from Northern England, Southern England or the Midlands. Note that Twitter users must opt-in to have their location information included in their tweet metadata.
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