This guest post by Mary Leverance, Preservation, Conservation, and Teaching Coordinator for the University Libraries and Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, is third in a series of four addressing open access and geospatial data.
Animated map of earthquake Tweets August 23 2011
By Eric Fischer [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Social networks contain groups of people who have common interests and a desire to share information, whether it’s about themselves, a place, or someone else. This volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a large and continually growing component of social networks. Within these networks, people contribute, collaborate, motivate, and communicate, using computers and smartphones. Examples of social networks with VGI capabilities include: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Foursquare, Yelp, Google Maps, Flickr, OpenStreetMap, and WikiMapia. Some of these networks were not designed with VGI expressly in mind, but they contain features that allow it (e.g., Yelp, Facebook).
The ability to edit, rate, comment, and tag content provides other users with new information. Sharing local knowledge is a major motivator within social networks. There is an appeal of being the person in your community who’s in the know and can tell everyone else what is happening, whether it’s information about the wait time or long lines at a polling place, geotagged photos of people attending demonstrations and protests, or video of the inside of a hot new restaurant. In turn, this user input drives the relevance of what is currently important to an online community (e.g., trending topics on Twitter, “Trending Now” section on Yahoo!).
In 2009, researchers conducted a study analyzing the geography of social networks (Mapping the Geography of Social Networks). They examined five social networks—Yelp, TwitterVision, Flickr, Gypsii, and POIfriend—to determine which network was the best research candidate. Flickr met all requirements for evaluating usefulness: it has a large number of members and geotagged photographs, photographs contain geographic information about the members as well as their uploaded pictures, members have publicly available contacts (who also have geographic information in their profiles and pictures), and Flickr provides an API that can be used for data mashups. These characteristics make Flickr a potentially powerful data source for investigating trends in human behavior.
Compiling the VGI on social networks will produce a dataset that can then be turned into maps; these maps are informative, and often reveal the geography of the networks themselves. Maps can be created to show Facebook friendships across the globe, or even where people do not use Facebook. Paths taken by tourists in a city can be tracked from photographs posted to Flickr. Twitter or Facebook statuses indicating a check-in at an airport can be used to follow where people live to where and when they travel. Some of the maps even show a “heat” index so a user can see where the higher concentrations of particular instances are taking place. Here are some visually impressive map and social network mashups:
- The one million tweet map
- Map your Facebook friends
- Mapping the World’s Friendships
- Sightsmap
- Locals and Tourists
The majority of social network connections are made with the intentions of connecting with others to enjoy and share life experiences. Experiences may be good or bad, and in the case of disasters—natural or man-made—VGI in social networks increases. Sharing of real-time local knowledge (you felt the earthquake but you’re safe, or adding data to open access maps so rescue workers can reach those needing help) in these cases is also motivated by altruism. Social networks are an effective and efficient tool for delivering vital location information to many people at once.
People are motivated to participate in social networks for many of the same reasons they are motivated to produce geographic information. Since the ability to contribute VGI is woven in to social networks, it is a trend that will continue. The two applications are mutually beneficial; social networking would not be as interesting without the VGI component, and VGI would not be readily available without social networks. However, not all VGI is fully reliant on the social aspect of networks. The final post in this series will take a look at potential VGI-based solutions for improving quality of life within cities.