Friday, March 10, 2017

Geovisualization of Social Media

Figure 1: Map Mashup of Twitter data, where eachdot
represents a tweet, the text corresponds to the selected
 tweet marked with a star
In the recently released "The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology" we were asked to write a brief entry entitled "geovisualization of social media". Below is a summary of  our chapter:

The proliferation of social media over the last decade is presenting substantial computational challenges associated with the management, processing, analysis and visualization of the corresponding massive volumes of data. Furthermore, this new form of information also imposes new-found challenges upon the geographical community due to the unique nature of its content, as analyzing such data calls for a hybrid mix of spatial and social analysis. The spatial content of social media comprises primarily coordinates from which the contributions originate, or references to specific locations. At the same time, these data have a strong social component, as they can reveal the underlying social structure of the user community through manifestations of their interactions. Analyzing both the spatial and social content of social media feeds is referred to as geosocial analysis. Within this entry we explore the geovisualization opportunities and challenges that are emerging as social media are becoming the subject of study of the geographical community.
In more detail, we start off discussing how the geographic content of social media feeds represents a new type of geographic information. It transcends the early definitions of crowdsourcing or volunteered geographic information as it is not the product of a process through which citizens explicitly and purposefully contribute geographic information to update or expand geographic databases. Instead, the type of geographic information that can be harvested from social media feeds can be referred to as Ambient Geographic Information; it is embedded in the content of these feeds, often across the content of numerous entries rather than within a single one, and has to be somehow extracted. Nevertheless, it is of great importance as it communicates instantaneously information about emerging issues. At the same time, it provides an unparalleled view of the complex social networking and cultural dynamics within a society, and captures the temporal evolution of the human landscape.

In many cases, the geovisualization of social media feeds predominately take the appearance of web map mashups, in essence portraying the location of social media usage on a map. Such an early attempt to visualize social media is shown Figure 1. We argue that while this approach is informative, it often falls short of capturing the depth, richness, and complexity of the information that can be gleaned from social data. As a result, a need for more advanced geovisualization approaches that are capable of better capturing and communicating the complexity and multidimensionality of social media arises. And this is the focus of our chapter. We discuss briefly the geovisualization of network structures (such as shown in Figure 2), the geovisualization of network structure dynamics, the geovisualization of social media content (such as shown in Figure 3) along with the visualization of social media analysis (Figure 4) and conclude the chapter with a list of emerging research challenges.

Figure 2: Visualizing communities: a social network of an interest group (a), and the geovisualization of the  largest community shown over the contiguous U.S (B).

Figure 3: Visualizing social media content dynamics by coupling a Twitter stream viewer (A), a Twitter activity density map (B), and a ranked list top hash-tags (C) and top authors (E), a time slider (D), and author/hash-tags time series graphs.
Figure 4: Visualizing spatiotemporal clusters of tweets following the 2013 Boston bombing. Red circles indicate the approximate radius of each cluster, and color is used to indicate time.


We hope you enjoy. As always any feedback or comments most welcome. Please note this chapter was written a couple of years ago and more recent work by us has been done, click here to see some.

Full Reference:
Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T., Radzikowski, J. and Stefanidis, A. (2017), Geovisualization of Social Media, in Richardson, D., Castree, N., Goodchild, M. F., Kobayashi, A. L., Liu, W. and Marston, R. (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, Wiley Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0605 (PDF)

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