Spatializing Social Media Social Networks Online and Offline

Spatializing Social Media charts the theoretical and methodological challenges in analyzing and visualizing social media data mapped to geographic areas. It introduces the reader to concepts, theories, and methods that sit at the crossroads between spatial and social network analysis to unpack the conceptual differences between online and face-to-face social networks and the nonlinear effects triggered by social activity that overlaps online and offline.

The book is divided into four sections, with the first accounting for the differences between space (the geometrical arrangements that structure and enable forms of interaction) and place (the mechanisms through which social meanings are attached to physical locations). The second section covers the rationale of social network analysis and the ontological differences, stating that relationships, more than individual and independent attributes, are key to understanding of social behavior. The third section covers a range of case studies that successfully mapped social media activity to geographically situated areas and considers the inflection of homophilous dependencies across online and offline social networks. The fourth and last section of the book explores a range of networks and discusses methods for and approaches to plotting a social network graph onto a map, including the purpose-built R package Spatial Social Media.

The book takes a non-mathematical approach to social networks and spatial statistics suitable for postgraduate students in sociology, psychology and the social sciences.

Funding

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

SECTION I

Local and digital: the dyadic interaction of social and virtual

1 Place and space

2 Face-to-face and online communities

3 From global village to identity tribes

SECTION II

Social and spatial networks: the dyadic interaction of virtual and spatial

4 Network spillover

5 Social networks

6 Spatial analysis

SECTION III

Social networks online and offline: the dyadic interaction of social and spatial

7 Spatial and social media data

8 Online-offline coordination

9 The directionality of homophily

SECTION IV

Mapping online to offline social networks: bridging geography and geodesy

10 Network layouts by geodesy and geography

11 Methods in spatial statistics for social networks

12 An R package for spatializing social media

Conclusion

Index of names

Index of subjects

Marco Bastos is the University College Dublin Ad Astra Fellow at the School of Information and Communication Studies and Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. His research leverages computational methods and network science to explore the intersection of communication and critical data studies.