Geosocial Analytics

Abstract

The adoption of spatially integrated approaches has become an increasing trend in social sciences. Concurring with the spatial turn in social sciences, there has been a social turn in geography. Inspired by the theoretical debates in the social turn in geography, particularly the debate around the concept of space, we critically reflect on existing studies of spatially integrated social sciences. Following that, we propose a geosocial analytical framework for a more comprehensive knowledge of our lived society. The geosocial analytical framework should lay geographical research pathways at its center, keeps open to both quantitative and qualitative methods as well as computational technologies, remains interested in any topics relevant to human societies and potentially engages with conventional social theories. Some challenges possibly faced by the implication of geosocial analytics have been identified as well, namely data sources, ethical concerns, and the difficulties in the combination of different research approaches. We take the chapter as an initiative to introduce the geosocial analytics and we encourage more researchers to further work on it.