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The exodus of displaced populations is a recurring historical phenomenon, and the ongoing Syrian humanitarian crisis is its latest incarnation. During such mass migration events, information is an essential commodity. Of particular importance is geographical (e.g., pathways and refugee camps) and social (e.g., refugee activities and networking) information. Traditionally, such information had been produced and disseminated by authorities, but a new paradigm is emerging: Web 2.0 and mobile computing technologies enable the involved stakeholder communities to produce, access, and consume migration-related information. The purpose of this article is to put forward a new typology for understanding the factors around migration and to examine the potential of crowd-generated data—especially open data and volunteered geographic information—to study such events. Using the recent wave of migration to Europe from the Middle East and northern Africa as a case study, we examine how migration-related information can be dynamically mined and analyzed to study the migrants' pathways from their home countries to their destination sites, as well as the conditions and activities that evolve during the migration process. These new data sources can provide a deeper and more fine-grained understanding of the migration process, often in real-time, and often through the eyes of the communities affected by it. Nevertheless, this also raises significant methodological and technical challenges for their future use associated with potential biases, data quality issues, and data processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last several decades have witnessed a shift in the way in which news is delivered and consumed by users. With the growth and advancements in mobile technologies, the Internet, and Web 2.0 technologies users are not only consumers of news, but also producers of online content. This has resulted in a novel and highly participatory cyber-physical news awareness ecosystem that fosters digital activism, in which volunteers contribute content to online communities. While studies have examined the various components of this news awareness ecosystem, little is still known about how news media coverage (and in particular digital media) impacts digital activism. In order to address this challenge and develop a greater understanding of it, this paper focuses on a specific form of digital activism, that of the production of digital geographical content through crowdsourcing efforts. Using refugee camps from around the world as a case study, we examine the relationship between news coverage (via Google news), search trends (via Google trends) and user edit contribution patterns in OpenStreetMap, a prominent geospatial data crowdsourcing platform. In addition, we compare and contrast these patterns with user edit patterns in Wikipedia, a well-known non-geospatial crowdsourcing platform. Using Google news and Google trends to derive a measure of thematic public awareness, our findings indicate that digital activism bursts tend to take place during periods of sustained build-up of public awareness deficit or surplus. These findings are in line with two prominent mass communication theories: agenda setting and corrective action, and suggest the emergence of a novel stimulus-awareness-activism framework in today’s participatory digital age. Moreover, these findings further complement existing research examining the motivational factors that drive users to contribute to online collaborative communities. This paper brings us one step closer to understanding the underlying mechanisms that drive digital activism in particular in the geospatial domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Place can be generally defined as a location that has been assigned meaning through human experience, and as such it is of multidisciplinary scientific interest. Up to this point place has been studied primarily within the context of social sciences as a theoretical construct. The availability of large amounts of user-generated content, e.g. in the form of social media feeds or Wikipedia contributions, allows us for the first time to computationally analyze and quantify the shared meaning of place. By aggregating references to human activities within urban spaces we can observe the emergence of unique themes that characterize different locations, thus identifying places through their discernible sociocultural signatures. In this paper we present results from a novel quantitative approach to derive such sociocultural signatures from Twitter contributions and also from corresponding Wikipedia entries. By contrasting the two we show how particular thematic characteristics of places (referred to herein as platial themes) are emerging from such crowd-contributed content, allowing us to observe the meaning that the general public, either individually or collectively, is assigning to specific locations. Our approach leverages probabilistic topic modelling, semantic association, and spatial clustering to find locations are conveying a collective sense of place. Deriving and quantifying such meaning allows us to observe how people transform a location to a place and shape its characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade we have witnessed a significant growth in the use of social media. Interactions within their context lead to the establishment of groups that function at the intersection of the physical and cyber spaces, and as such represent hybrid communities. Gaining a better understanding of how information flows in these hybrid communities is a substantial scientific challenge with significant implications on our ability to better harness crowd-contributed content. This paper addresses this challenge by studying how information propagates and evolves over time at the intersection of the physical and cyber spaces. By analyzing the spatial footprint, social network structure, and content in both physical and cyber spaces we advance our understanding of the information propagation mechanisms in social media. The utility of this approach is demonstrated in two real-world case studies, the first reflecting a planned event (the Occupy Wall Street – OWS – movement’s Day of Action in November 2011), and the second reflecting an unexpected disaster (the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013). Our findings highlight the intricate nature of the propagation and evolution of information both within and across cyber and physical spaces, as well as the role of hybrid networks in the exchange of information between these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remarkable success of online social media sites marks a shift in the way people connect and share information. Much of this information now contains some form of geographical content because of the proliferation of location-aware devices, thus fostering the emergence ofgeosocialmedia – a new type of user-generated geospatial information. Through geosocial media we are able, for the first time, to observe human activities in scales and resolutions that were so far unavailable. Furthermore, the wide spectrum of social media data and service types provides a multitude of perspectives on real-world activities and happenings, thus opening new frontiers in geosocial knowledge discovery. However, gleaning knowledge from geosocial media is a challenging task, as they tend to be unstructured and thematically diverse. To address these challenges, this article presents a system prototype for harvesting, processing, modeling, and integrating heterogeneous social media feeds towards the generation of geosocial knowledge. Our article addresses primarily two key components of this system prototype: a novel data model for heterogeneous social media feeds and a corresponding general system architecture. We present these key components and demonstrate their implementation in our system prototype, GeoSocial Gauge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media feeds are rapidly emerging as a novel avenue for the contribution and dissemination of information that is often geographic. Their content often includes references to events occurring at, or affecting specific locations. Within this article we analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the twitter feed activity responding to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred on the East Coast of the United States ( US) on August 23, 2011. We argue that these feeds represent a hybrid form of a sensor system that allows for the identification and localization of the impact area of the event. By contrasting this with comparable content collected through the dedicated crowdsourcing 'Did You Feel It?' ( DYFI) website of the U. S. Geological Survey we assess the potential of the use of harvested social media content for event monitoring. The experiments support the notion that people act as sensors to give us comparable results in a timely manner, and can complement other sources of data to enhance our situational awareness and improve our understanding and response to such events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted governments worldwide to implement a range of containment measures, including mass gathering restrictions, social distancing, and school closures. Despite these efforts, vaccines continue to be the safest and most effective means of combating such viruses. Yet, vaccine hesitancy persists, posing a significant public health concern, particularly with the emergence of new COVID-19 variants. To effectively address this issue, timely data is crucial for understanding the various factors contributing to vaccine hesitancy. While previous research has largely relied on traditional surveys for this information, recent sources of data, such as social media, have gained attention. However, the potential of social media data as a reliable proxy for information on population hesitancy, especially when compared with survey data, remains underexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap. Our approach uses social, demographic, and economic data to predict vaccine hesitancy levels in the ten most populous US metropolitan areas. We employ machine learning algorithms to compare a set of baseline models that contain only these variables with models that incorporate survey data and social media data separately. Our results show that XGBoost algorithm consistently outperforms Random Forest and Linear Regression, with marginal differences between Random Forest and XGBoost. This was especially the case with models that incorporate survey or social media data, thus highlighting the promise of the latter data as a complementary information source. Results also reveal variations in influential variables across the five hesitancy classes, such as age, ethnicity, occupation, and political inclination. Further, the application of models to different MSAs yields mixed results, emphasizing the uniqueness of communities and the need for complementary data approaches. In summary, this study underscores social media data's potential for understanding vaccine hesitancy, emphasizes the importance of tailoring interventions to specific communities, and suggests the value of combining different data sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community can be viewed as a set of networks manifested through various transnational activities. The availability of longitudinal data sets such as international arms trades and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) allows for the study of state-driven interactions over time. In parallel to this top-down approach, the recent emergence of social media is fostering a bottom-up and citizen-driven avenue for international relations (IRs). The comparison of these two network types offers a new lens to study the alignment between states and their people. This article presents a network-driven approach to analyze communities as they are established through different forms of bottom-up (e.g., Twitter) and top-down (e.g., UNGA voting records and international arms trade records) IRs. By constructing and comparing different network communities, we were able to evaluate the similarities between state-driven and citizen-driven networks. In order to validate our approach we identified communities in UNGA voting records during and after the Cold War. Our approach showed that the similarity between UNGA communities during and after the Cold War was 0.55 and 0.81, respectively (in a 0–1 scale). To explore the state- versus citizen-driven interactions, we focused on the recent events in Syria within Twitter over a sample period of 1 month. The analysis of these data show a clear misalignment (0.25) between citizen-formed international networks and the ones established by the Syrian government (e.g., through its UNGA voting patterns). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social media are often heralded as offering cancer campaigns new opportunities to reach the public. However, these campaigns may not be equally successful, depending on the nature of the campaign itself, the type of cancer being addressed, and the social media platform being examined. This study is the first to compare social media activity on Twitter and Instagram across three time periods: #WorldCancerDay in February, the annual month-long campaigns of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) in October and Movember in November, and during the full year outside of these campaigns. Our results suggest that women's reproductive cancers - especially breast cancer - tend to outperform men's reproductive cancer - especially prostate cancer - across campaigns and social media platforms. Twitter overall generates substantially more activity than Instagram for both cancer campaigns, suggesting Instagram may be an untapped resource. However, the messaging for both campaigns tends to focus on awareness and support rather than on concrete actions and behaviors. We suggest health communication efforts need to focus on effective messaging and building engaged communities for cancer communication across social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer awareness campaigns compete with other health and social issues for public attention. We examined whether public engagement with breast cancer and prostate cancer declined in 2016 during the U.S. presidential election compared to 2015 on Twitter and Google Trends. We found that attention to breast cancer and prostate cancer declined in 2016 before the election as compared to 2015 in Twitter posts and Google searches. The findings suggest that cancer information seeking behavior, passive exposure to health communication, and active participation in social media about cancer all decreased during the peak weeks of the 2016 election season. Future health promotion initiatives and information dissemination efforts will benefit from monitoring the major issues garnering social media attention and then adjusting their timing or communication strategies to ensure that public engagement with their key policy messages remains strong when emerging news stories capture public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of social media content for the extraction of geospatial information and event-related knowledge has recently received substantial attention. In this article we present an approach that leverages the complementary nature of social multimedia content by utilizing heterogeneous sources of social media feeds to assess the impact area of a natural disaster. More specifically, we introduce a novel social multimedia triangulation process that uses both Twitter and Flickr content in an integrated two-step process: Twitter content is used to identify toponym references associated with a disaster; this information is then used to provide approximate orientation for the associated Flickr imagery, allowing us to delineate the impact area as the overlap of multiple view footprints. In this approach, we practically crowdsource approximate orientations from Twitter content and use this information to orient Flickr imagery accordingly and identify the impact area through viewshed analysis and viewpoint integration. This approach enables us to avoid computationally intensive image analysis tasks associated with traditional image orientation, while allowing us to triangulate numerous images by having them pointed towards the crowdsourced toponym location. The article presents our approach and demonstrates its performance using a real-world wildfire event as a representative application case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban form and function have been studied extensively in urban planning and geographical information science. However, gaining a greater understanding of how they merge to define the urban morphology remains a substantial scientific challenge. Toward this goal, this paper addresses the opportunities presented by the emergence of crowdsourced data to gain novel insights into form and function in urban spaces. We are focusing in particular on information harvested from social media and other open-source and volunteered datasets (e.g. trajectory and OpenStreetMap data). These data provide a first-hand account of form and function from the people who define urban space through their activities. This novel bottom-up approach to study these concepts complements traditional urban studies to provide a new lens for studying urban activity. By synthesizing recent advancements in the analysis of open-source data, we provide a new typology for characterizing the role of crowdsourcing in the study of urban morphology. We illustrate this new perspective by showing how social media, trajectory, and traffic data can be analyzed to capture the evolving nature of a city’s form and function. While these crowd contributions may be explicit or implicit in nature, they are giving rise to an emerging research agenda for monitoring, analyzing, and modeling form and function for urban design and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]