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Full-Text Articles in Geography

Challenges When Identifying Migration From Geo-Located Twitter Data, Caitrin Armstrong, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, Derek Ruths, Thomas Soehl Jan 2021

Challenges When Identifying Migration From Geo-Located Twitter Data, Caitrin Armstrong, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, Derek Ruths, Thomas Soehl

Geography Faculty Publications

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code …


Viral Data, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Matthew Zook Nov 2020

Viral Data, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Matthew Zook

Geography Faculty Publications

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals …


Covid-19 Is Spatial: Ensuring That Mobile Big Data Is Used For Social Good, Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook, Tuuli Toivonen Jul 2020

Covid-19 Is Spatial: Ensuring That Mobile Big Data Is Used For Social Good, Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook, Tuuli Toivonen

Geography Faculty Publications

The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic. The avalanche of mobile Big Data makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. However, the current crisis also highlights serious limitations in the readiness to take the advantage of mobile Big Data for social good, both within and beyond the interests of health sector. We propose …