#Conclusion

Using both GIS and social media in an effort to explore and understand eating habits within the city of Vancouver has been an exciting look into the abilities available with the emergence of further developments and technologies in GIS, as well as greater societal awareness of the abilities of GIS in the context of public generated content. A lexicon was developed that contained all pertinent words and phrases, in addition to their variations that were associated with body image, eating habits, food, and emotions. Using this lexicon, all Vancouver tweets that were identified as relevant, were extracted and then displayed spatially, showing:

1. High clusters in the most densely populated (both people and restaurant) areas (i.e., Downtown Core, East Broadway, Commercial Drive),
2. There were slightly more healthy tweets around downtown than unhealthy but more unhealthy tweets in lower populated areas outside of the downtown core and East Broadway;
3. Green Spaces did not show a strong correlation to Healthy or Unhealthy tweets around it.

There was an evident need for better techniques for dealing with such vastness as social media data, considering its perpetual production as a result of geographic oversharing. Additionally, more parameters could have been used for stronger and more reflective analysis of the ‘Health’ of Vancouver. GIS was used to visualize the relationship of healthy versus unhealthy tweets in relation to negative emotions in terms of density which creates starting point for future scopes in this field, as social media data can be utilized across multiple fields of research. This study opened up the conversation of using readily available Twitter sourced big data as a cost-effective and efficient method in researching Vancouver’s physical and emotional health.