Tracking Location in Public Social Media Posts

[Policy Wonk]

I'm working on a project that among other things seeks to document that there are signs of human life in and around a location and immediate area on the periphery of downtown.

Something we would like to capture is social media posts the originate in that area, we have someone searching public twitter and instagram posts, but it is extremely labourious. An hour's work might yield a dozen relevant posts, most of which are pictures of food.

We talked to a "social media expert" and the only positive thing to come out of the meeting was none of us stabbed her within the first ten minutes. She completely didn't comprehend that we're trying to do, but spewed more jargon in a short time than I had ever heard before in my life.

Does anyone know of a way to relatively automate this, there are various websites that search by location. But are either latching on to places identified by google, or facebook, or whatever. Many of which are just wrong, rather than a geographic or neighbourhood location that is none-the-less embedded in many of the posts.

The ultimate goal is to say look at all these cool hipsters who already frequent the area.

Does anyone have any idea how to tackle this without human eyes glazing over at endless pictures of pilaf?