Papers by Monica Stephens
Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 2013
This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide th... more This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations of previous analyses of user-generated geographic information. Though more illustrative than explanatory, the results of our analysis suggest a cautious approach toward the use of the geoweb and big data that are as mindful of their shortcomings as their potential.More specifically, we propose five extensions to the typical practice of mapping georeferenced data that we call going ‘beyond the geotag’: (1) going beyond social media that is explicitly geographic; (2) going beyond spatialities of the ‘here and now’; (3) going beyond the proximate; (4) going beyond the human to data produced by bots and automated systems, and (5) going beyond the geoweb itself, by leveraging these sources against ancillary data, such as news reports and census data. We see these extensions of existing methodologies as providing the potential for overcoming existing limitations on the analysis of the geoweb.The principal case study focuses on the widely reported riots following the University of Kentucky men's basketball team's victory in the 2012 NCAA championship and its manifestation within the geoweb. Drawing upon a database of archived Twitter activity – including all geotagged tweets since December 2011–we analyze the geography of tweets that used a specific hashtag (#LexingtonPoliceScanner) in order to demonstrate the potential application of our methodological and conceptual program. By tracking the social, spatial, and temporal diffusion of this hashtag, we show how large databases of such spatially referenced internet content can be used in a more systematic way for critical social and spatial analysis.
This paper compares the social properties of Twitter users’ networks with the spatial proximity o... more This paper compares the social properties of Twitter users’ networks with the spatial proximity of the networks. Using a comprehensive analysis of network density and network transitivity we found that the density of networks and the spatial clustering depends on the size of the network; smaller networks are more socially clustered and extend a smaller physical distance and larger networks are physically more dispersed with less social clustering. Additionally, Twitter networks are more effective at transmitting information at the local level. For example, local triadic connections are more than twice as likely to be transitive than those extending more than 500 km. This implies that not only is distance important to the communities developed in online social networks, but scale is extremely pertinent to the nature of these networks. Even as technologies such as Twitter enable a larger volume of interaction between spaces, these interactions do not invent completely new social and spatial patterns, but instead replicate existing arrangements.
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +B... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
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Papers by Monica Stephens