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Mapping Spatial Information Landscape in Cyberspace with Social Media

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CyberGIS for Geospatial Discovery and Innovation

Part of the book series: GeoJournal Library ((GEJL,volume 118))

Abstract

This chapter describesa Spatial Web Automatic Reasoning and Mapping System (SWARMS) for visualizing and analyzing space-time dimensions of information landscape represented by a social media channel—Twitter. SWARMS utilizes computer programming and Twitter Search APIs to retrieve tweets by searching keywords from the Twitter database. Two case studies were conducted to analyze the spatial information landscape: the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election and 2012 summer movies. The two case studies were selected because these events can have a reality check by comparing to the actual election results and the movie box office revenue. Our preliminary spatial analysis indicates that there is correlation and geographic linkage between cyberspace communications and the real-world events. However, some cyberspace representation maps or information landscapes may be distorted from reality to degrees that depend on the media communication channels and varies by topics. As a pilot study of mapping cyberspace to real space, this chapter presents two case studies on visualizing information landscape in cyberspace and also addresses some limitations and suggestions for future research in this domain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/04/fact-sheet-big-data-across-federal-government.

  2. 2.

    https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123607.

  3. 3.

    https://blog.twitter.com/2012/twitter-turns-six.

  4. 4.

    https://www.flickr.com/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.instagram.com/.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1416509, IBSS project titled “Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social Networks”. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, San Diego State University, Diego, USA

    Jiue-An Yang, Ming-Hsiang Tsou & Li An

  2. School of Communication, San Diego State University, Diego, USA

    Brian Spitzberg

  3. Department of Linguistics, San Diego State University, Diego, USA

    Jean Mark Gawron

  4. Department of Political Science, San Diego State University, Diego, USA

    Dipak Gupta

Authors
  1. Jiue-An Yang
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  2. Ming-Hsiang Tsou
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  3. Brian Spitzberg
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  4. Li An
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  5. Jean Mark Gawron
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  6. Dipak Gupta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ming-Hsiang Tsou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Shaowen Wang

  2. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA

    Michael F. Goodchild

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Yang, JA., Tsou, MH., Spitzberg, B., An, L., Gawron, J.M., Gupta, D. (2019). Mapping Spatial Information Landscape in Cyberspace with Social Media. In: Wang, S., Goodchild, M. (eds) CyberGIS for Geospatial Discovery and Innovation. GeoJournal Library, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1531-5_5

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