Mapping social-network interactions

Abstract

Blogs, micro-blogs and online forums are fundamental building blocks of an interconnected world. They provide a mechanism for people to communicate details of their lives and the spatial locations of their activities. Desktop, online and mobile mapping APIs have never been so rich yet this presents challenges to build applications that blend meaningful content with visual appeal. Here, we begin by examining the series of APIs needed to collect this spatial expression of micro-blogging from the social networking tool Twitter. To create cartographically appropriate and semantically relevant ‘twitter maps’ we blend functionality and data from APIs by Esri, Google, Twitter and others. We then demonstrate how to leverage the available APIs to create an interactive application enabling real – time mapping of students undertaking mobile data collection exercises. Two examples are presented: a “race” monitoring application focussing on extracting and mapping temporal variables and a category building, asynchronous collaborative land – use mapping exercise where the semantic content and location of tweets is emphasized.