Mapping Spatial Information Landscape in Cyberspace with Social Media

Abstract

This chapter describesa Spatial Web Automatic Reasoning and Mapping System (SWARMS) for visualizing and analyzing space-time dimensions of information landscape represented by a social media channel—Twitter. SWARMS utilizes computer programming and Twitter Search APIs to retrieve tweets by searching keywords from the Twitter database. Two case studies were conducted to analyze the spatial information landscape: the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election and 2012 summer movies. The two case studies were selected because these events can have a reality check by comparing to the actual election results and the movie box office revenue. Our preliminary spatial analysis indicates that there is correlation and geographic linkage between cyberspace communications and the real-world events. However, some cyberspace representation maps or information landscapes may be distorted from reality to degrees that depend on the media communication channels and varies by topics. As a pilot study of mapping cyberspace to real space, this chapter presents two case studies on visualizing information landscape in cyberspace and also addresses some limitations and suggestions for future research in this domain.