Friday, December 16, 2011

Occupy Wall Street movement via Twitter

Following on from our work on harvesting ambient geospatial information (AGI) from social media feeds we have started to explore the Occupy Wall Street movement. The movie below shows just one part of this work, specifically the movement of the protesters in New York during the Action Day (November 17) from Wall Street to Brooklyn Bridge. The red dots denote locations of the tweets. Selected tweets are displayed at the bottom of the screen. Active tweets are marked with a white star.






More ananylsis to follow...

Monday, December 12, 2011

New GeoMason Models

We been working on adding more spatial agent based models examples to GeoMason, the GIS extension for MASON. These include a vegetation growth model utilizing raster data and a simple disease outbreak model utilizing vector data. See below for more details.

Vegetation Growth Model:
Eastern Africa has undergone sustained drought for over a decade placing a great strain on the local population. This demo introduces an agent-based model of grazing called Turkana South. The model makes use of NDVI data and monthly rainfall data to drive vegetation growth. After describing the model, the paper investigates the effect rainfall has on carrying capacity and how carrying capacity varies based on initial starting conditions. I conclude that carrying capacity is independent of initial population size.







Disease Outbreak:
This demo introduces a new agent-based model (ABM) for studying the spread of influenza through the schools and households of Fairfax County, VA. It is intended to explore the following questions. How does an epidemic outbreak spread through a school system? What containment approaches might be most effective at stopping an outbreak?






To find out more about GeoMason (including the data and source code for these models) click here

Thanks to Joseph Harrison for sharing these models which where developed for class projects at the Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University.




Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds

A paper I  recently co-authored with Anthony Stefanidis and Jacek Radzikowski from George Mason University entitled "Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds" is now available in  GeoJournal. 
 
The abstract for the paper reads as follows: "Social media generated from many individuals is playing a greater role in our daily lives and provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight on information flow and social networking within a society. Through data collection and analysis of its content, it supports a greater mapping and understanding of the evolving human landscape. The information disseminated through such media represents a deviation from volunteered geography, in the sense that it is not geographic information per se. Nevertheless, the message often has geographic footprints, for example, in the form of locations from where the tweets originate, or references in their content to geographic entities. We argue that such data conveys ambient geospatial information, capturing for example, people’s references to locations that represent momentary social hotspots. In this paper we address a framework to harvest such ambient geospatial information, and resulting hybrid capabilities to analyze it to support situational awareness as it relates to human activities. We argue that this emergence of ambient geospatial analysis represents a second step in the evolution of geospatial data availability, following on the heels of volunteered geographical information."

Geolocating pairs of tweeters and retweeters