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Mapping Social-Network Interactions

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Book cover Online Maps with APIs and WebServices

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

Blogs, micro-blogs and online forums are fundamental building blocks of an interconnected world. They provide a mechanism for people to communicate details of their lives and the spatial locations of their activities. Desktop, online and mobile mapping APIs have never been so rich yet this presents challenges to build applications that blend meaningful content with visual appeal.

Here, we begin by examining the series of APIs needed to collect this spatial expression of micro-blogging from the social networking tool Twitter. To create cartographically appropriate and semantically relevant ‘twitter maps’ we blend functionality and data from APIs by Esri, Google, Twitter and others.

We then demonstrate how to leverage the available APIs to create an interactive application enabling real – time mapping of students undertaking mobile data collection exercises. Two examples are presented: a “race” monitoring application focussing on extracting and mapping temporal variables and a category building, asynchronous collaborative land – use mapping exercise where the semantic content and location of tweets is emphasized.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The justification for the selection of Twitter as a social networking client is discussed later in this section and in the Sect. 16.4.

  2. 2.

    Twitarcs: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitArcs/TwitArcs.html.

  3. 3.

    Social Collider: http://socialcollider.net/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was part funded by the transforming curriculum delivery through technology JISC e-learning programme Mobilising Remote Student Engagement (MoRSE), a collaborative project between researchers at Kingston University London and De Montfort University, Leicester. It is also part-funded by a SPLINT-CETL Honorary Visiting Fellowship award at University of Leicester and part‐funded by the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES) Subject Centre Learning and Teaching Development fund programme Mobile Decision‐making in the Cloud (MobiDIC) project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Risk Frontiers, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    James O’Brien

  2. ESRI Inc, Redlands, CA, USA

    Kenneth Field

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  1. James O’Brien
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  2. Kenneth Field
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Correspondence to James O’Brien .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Geography & Geology, University of Nebraska, Omaha, Dodge Street 6001, Omaha, 68182-0199, Nebraska, USA

    Michael P. Peterson

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O’Brien, J., Field, K. (2012). Mapping Social-Network Interactions. In: Peterson, M. (eds) Online Maps with APIs and WebServices. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27485-5_16

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