Skip to main content

On Spatial Measures of Geographic Relevance for Geotagged Social Media Content

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Big Data Analytics in the Social and Ubiquitous Context (SENSEML 2015, MUSE 2014, MSM 2014)

Abstract

Recently, geotagged social media contents became increasingly available to researchers and were subject to more and more studies. Different spatial measures such as Focus, Entropy and Spread have been applied to describe geospatial characteristics of social media contents. In this paper, we draw the attention to the fact that these popular measures do not necessarily show the geographic relevance or dependence of social content, but mix up geographic relevance, the distribution of the user population, and sample size. Therefore, results based on these measures cannot be interpreted as geographic effects alone. By means of an assessment, based on Twitter data collected over a time span of six weeks, we highlight potential misinterpretations and we furthermore propose normalized measures which show less dependency on the underlying user population and are able to mitigate the effect of outliers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Backstrom, L., Kleinberg, J., Kumar, R., Novak, J.: Spatial variation in search engine queries. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 357–366. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Brodersen, A., Scellato, S., Wattenhofer, M.: Youtube around the world: geographic popularity of videos. In: 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2012, pp. 241–250. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ding, J., Gravano, L., Shivakumar, N.: Computing geographical scopes of web resources. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2000, pp. 545–556. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kamath, K.Y., Caverlee, J., Lee, K., Cheng, Z.: Spatio-temporal dynamics of online memes: a study of geo-tagged tweets. In: 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2013, pp. 667–678. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Kumar, U., Kumar, V., Kapur, J.N.: Normalized measures of entropy. Int. J. Gen. Syst. 12(1), 55–69 (1986)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  6. Leopardi, P.: A partition of the unit sphere into regions of equal area and small diameter. Electron. Trans. Numer. Anal. 25, 309–327 (2006)

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Li, L., Goodchild, M.F., Xu, B.: Spatial, temporal, and socioeconomic patterns in the use of twitter and flickr. Cartography Geogr. Inf. Sci. 40(2), 61–77 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Openshaw, S.: The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography. Geo Books, Norwick (1984)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Petrovic, S., Osborne, M., McCreadie, R., Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Shrimpton, L.: Can twitter replace newswire for breaking news? In: Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. The AAAI Press (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Scellato, S., Noulas, A., Lambiotte, R., Mascolo, C.: Socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks. In: ICWSM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wang, X., Gaugel, T., Keller, M.: On spatial measures for geotagged social media contents. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Mining Ubiquitous and Social Environment (2014)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tristan Gaugel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Wang, X., Gaugel, T., Keller, M. (2016). On Spatial Measures of Geographic Relevance for Geotagged Social Media Content. In: Atzmueller, M., Chin, A., Janssen, F., Schweizer, I., Trattner, C. (eds) Big Data Analytics in the Social and Ubiquitous Context. SENSEML MUSE MSM 2015 2014 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9546. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29009-6_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29009-6_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29008-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29009-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics