Abstract

Research Challenges and Opportunities for Mapping Cyberspace and Social Media
Track: Mapping
Authors: Ming-Hsiang Tsou

Mapping cyberspace and social media is a new research direction for geographers to study human thoughts and behaviors, global issues, and internet communication theories. With the new media (e.g., the Web and online social networks), scientists can trace geographic and chronological patterns to reveal the nature of significant events such as radical concepts, social movements, or epidemic outbreaks. The Web, a powerful platform for collective thinking and idea exchange, provides valuable intelligence to help scientists monitoring processes ranging in diversity from the spread of diseases to the structure of terrorist networks. This paper will summarize research challenges and opportunities for mapping cyberspace and social media.A few representative research challenges are: 1) selecting appropriate spatial units and time units for space-time analysis within the Time Geography framework; 2) creating real-time, interactive visualization tools for searching cyberspace or social media keywords; 3) classifying different types of web pages and social medias.