I needed a bit of time off from work during the holidays and decided to learn something new. I’ve created “Esquina do Brasil” @esquinadobrasil, a bot 🤖 that tweets the map 🛰🌎 of a random census tract in Brazil every 15 minutes. The tweet shows the satellite imagery data and includes additional information on resident population, area (km²), name of the neighborhood and whether that census tract is classified as an urban or rural area. The bot was created in R and the code is available on GitHub.

The purpose of this bot is to procrastinate help people ‘visit’ every single corner of Brazil and have a glance of the country’s beautiful places and inequality issues. The 🤖 is also meant to have an educational purpose to arouse people’s curiosity and interest on spatial data science and programming in R. Here’s the example of one of the early tweets from @esquinadobrasil.