Creating the heatmap

In this section, you'll create a heatmap of the Twitter feed using the Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool found in the Spatial Statistics Tools toolbox:

1. If required, open ArcMap and create a new map document file.

2. Add a basemap like Dark Gray Canvas or Light Gray Canvas work well to display a heatmap. The Light Gray Canvas basemap is displayed in the following screenshot:

   

3. Add the Tweets feature class as a layer to the display. The distribution of your tweet points will not be the same as what is displayed in the following screenshot:

   

4. If you zoom in to a specific area, you should see some clustering of the points, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

   Over the next few steps, you'll create a bounding box polygon to confine the distribution of the points. For this particular exercise, the tweet activity for SEC football games examined. The geographic distribution of the tweet activity is relatively confined to the south and south-eastern parts of the United States. However, there...