Spatialities of Data: Mapping Social Media ‘Beyond the Geotag’

GeoJournal, Forthcoming

19 Pages Posted: 26 Mar 2016

Date Written: March 24, 2016

Abstract

As emerging sources of so-called ‘big data’ are increasingly utilized in order to understand social and spatial processes, so too have these new data sources become the subject of harsh criticism from more critically-oriented geographers and social scientists. This paper argues that one of the major issues preventing a more productive dialogue between critical human geographers and those already engaging in the mapping and analysis of these new data sources is around the ways that space and spatiality are conceptualized in social media mapping. As such, this paper draws on and extends earlier critiques of the ‘spatial ontology of the geotag’, in which the geographic analysis of geotagged social media data over-privileges the single latitude/longitude coordinate pair attached to each individual data point, often leading to the kind of simplistic mappings and interpretations prevalent today. The goals of this paper are two-fold: first, to demonstrate how the spatial ontology of the geotag is implicitly operationalized within mainstream social media mapping exercises, and how this understanding of space remains incongruent with existing conceptions of space drawn from human geography. Second, using the example of tweeting in the wake of the August 2014 killing of an unarmed African-American teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this paper demonstrates how a more geographically-situated analysis of this kind of data, inspired by relational or multidimensional conceptualizations of space, can yield alternative understandings of the social processes embedded in such data.

Keywords: big data, critical GIS, relational space, social media, socio-spatial theory, Twitter

Suggested Citation

Shelton, Taylor, Spatialities of Data: Mapping Social Media ‘Beyond the Geotag’ (March 24, 2016). GeoJournal, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2754319

Taylor Shelton (Contact Author)

Mississippi State University

Mississippi State, MS 39762
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
113
Abstract Views
926
Rank
438,854
PlumX Metrics