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GIScience Considerations in Spatial Social Networks

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Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2016)

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Abstract

There has been a proliferation of literature that incorporates social network analysis (SNA) to study geographic phenomena. We argue that these incorporations have mostly been superficial. What is needed is a stronger interrogation of the challenges and possibilities of a tight coupling of spatial and social network concepts, which take advantage of the strengths of each methodology. In this paper, we create a typology of existing research focused on the integration of geography into SNA: nodal, topographic and spatial. We then describe three core concepts that co-exist in the two fields but are not necessarily complementary: distance, communities, and scale. We consider how they can be appropriated and how they can be more tightly coupled into spatial social networks. We argue that the only way we can move beyond a superficial integration is to holistically identify the challenges and consider new methods to address the complexities of integration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Machine learning uses the term ‘feature’ to refer to each attribute used to characterize an entity. Consequently, the n-dimensional space where the features live is referred to as a feature space. Here we use the term attribute space to avoid confusion with geographic features.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Dipto Sarkar, Renee Sieber & Raja Sengupta

  2. School of Environment, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Renee Sieber & Raja Sengupta

Authors
  1. Dipto Sarkar
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  2. Renee Sieber
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  3. Raja Sengupta
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Correspondence to Dipto Sarkar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Austin , Austin, Texas, USA

    Jennifer A. Miller

  2. University of California at Berkeley , Berkeley, California, USA

    David O'Sullivan

  3. University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Nancy Wiegand

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Sarkar, D., Sieber, R., Sengupta, R. (2016). GIScience Considerations in Spatial Social Networks. In: Miller, J., O'Sullivan, D., Wiegand, N. (eds) Geographic Information Science. GIScience 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9927. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_6

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