What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

Abstract

Most studies on Black Friday have largely relied on survey or sales data from case studies of specific cities, which are lack of spatial-temporal granularity. The recent development of location-aware technologies has enabled what Goodchild described as “humans as sensors”, and as a result there has been a large volume of volunteered geographic information with explicitly spatial and temporal tags. Mining these rapidly growing and timely data in the context of space-time synthesis provides a new perspective for understanding the pulse of shopping behavior. In this chapter, we analyze Black Friday patterns and trends in the USA using a dataset retrieved from Twitter. A spatial-temporal analysis of tweeting patterns is conducted. This study tries to discern patterns of tweets on Black Friday in a comparative context.