PROPOSAL OF DOCTORAL THESIS

EXPLORING OF PROSPECTS AND LIMITATIONS OF SPATIAL AWARE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE STUDY OF URBAN SPATIOTEMPORAL ANALYSIS

Tutor: Carlos Marmolejo Duarte

Doctoral candidate : Liya Yang

E-mail: liya.yang@outlook.com

Program: Urban and Architectural Management and Valuation

INTRODUCTION

Why does the project investigate it ?

Internet is becoming a “natural” surrounding in urban area. In the background of smart city, it is necessary to consider social media data as part of urban environment.

The deeper relation between physical city and virtual data still have not been discussed completely.

Titter Data source with geo-location (Steiger, et al. 2015)

Social media data is generated by users spontaneously. Compared with traditional data, what are new discoveries based on social media data?

Intangible factors of social media data

INTRODUCTION

How does the project prepare to study it ?

In this project, our study scope will focus on the spatial-aware

social media data, under the background of urban spatial-temporal analysis.

What is SPATIAL AWARE SOCIAL MEDIA ?

Detection of

human activities

in urban area

specific sensor

opportunistic sensor

Social media

Spatial-aware data

Non-spatial-aware

data

Mobile phone

with geo-information

DELIMITATION OF STUDY SCOPE

Blogs Business networks Collaborative projects……

E.g. map navigation

Type of social media

Type of social media Famous application

Spatial-aware data

Social networks Facebook

Social game Pokemon

Picture sharing Instagram, Flicker

Non-spatial-aware data

Blogs

Enterprise social networks

Linkedin

Microblogs

Collaborative projects

Video sharing Youtube

DELIMITATION OF STUDY SCOPE

What can spatial-aware social media provide for us ?

•keywords mining

•picture recognition

Contents

information

•Density

•Pattern

Geo-location

•Social network User’ characters

and social

relationship

• Health management(Nagel A.C. et al. ,2013)

• Disaster management(Sakati T. et al. ,2010)

• Event detection(Juris J S. ,2012)

• Spatial analysis • Detection of functional

area

• Social network analysis • Social network and social

movement (Nezar AlSayyad et al. 2015)

Delimitation of study scope

General objective and specific objectives

General Objective: The main objective of this project focus on investigating the applications and limitations of spatial-aware social media from the view of spatiotemporal analysis. Firstly, it proposes to summarize the advantages and limitations of spatial-aware social media, compared with traditional methods. Secondly, it plans to uncover the intangible impact factors of the data from the view of sociology and psychology. It places more emphases on qualitative analysis of SASM data and tries to bring the results into the case study. Ultimately, this thesis tries to bridge the theoretic gap between SASM data and urban geography in some degree.

General objective and specific objectives

specific objectives

1. Making a historically literature review about social media. Trying to classify the types of social

media and their methods of investigation, to decide the scope of the research.

2. In order to detect the bias and the kind of reality with spatial implications identified with such information, it prepares to explore the psychological and sociological motivations of people who prefer to use social media. It is possible to summarize the behavioral rules underlying various spatial behaviors.

3. Studying the pioneer researches of urban structure which utilize spatial-temporal framework and SASM data, especially, making comparison among researches in China, United States and European countries.

4. Building a preliminary hypothesis on the scope and limitations of SASM in the study of spatial-temporal structure.

5. To contrast the preliminary hypothesis against the opinion of key informants, and reformulate it as a consequence.

6. Choosing two metropolises as the case study, to verify the scope and limitations of SASM data that we summarized above.

7. To find out the applications and limitations of SASM data in urban spatiotemporal analysis.

The construction of the Hypothesis

In this project, we propose to adopt an inductive methodology to acquire the hypothesis. It tries to build a premier assumption first, then a hypothesis will be obtained by qualitatively contrasted in second stage. The definition of such scope and limitation will be the hypothesis to be produce at the end of the theoretical and literature review.

Premier hypothesis Initially, this project assumes that the spatial-aware social media (SASM) data actually can reflect and measure the urban spatial structure through human activities , though its applications exist limitations.

Theoretic foundation and Literature view

1. Explanations of behavior and formation of spatial behavior model

behavio

r

neurobiology

Culture

choice

Three explanations of behavior Source: Frank E. et al.(1971)

Theoretic foundation and Literature view

3. Urban studies within spatial-temporal framework

Time geography is a powerful conceptual framework for understanding human spatial behavior, in particular, constraints and trade-offs in the allocation of limited time among activities in space (Miller, 2005).

The Livehoods Project in Pittsburgh utilizes social media data of local residents gathered from a location-based online social network (Justin Cranshaw et al., 2012). Shan Jiang et al. (2012) study the urban spatial-temporal structure through a publicly available “Travel Tracker Survey” conducted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning in 2008.

2. Multi-disciplinary study about the human behaviour and social media

Type of social media data Scope of research

Contents, keywords Urban heath management Nagel A.C. et al. (2013)

Political movement Juris J S. (2012) Nezar AlSayyad et al. (2015)

Interaction of special event Disaster study Sakati T. et al. (2010)

Web page and social media contents Political issue Tsou M H. et al. (2013)

social media game Urban sustainability Mazdak Nik Bakht et al. (2015)

Methodology

•Researches

about social

media in the

spatiotemporal

analysis

•Relations

between spatial

pattern and

human

activities

Literature

review

•Theoretical

basis

•Construction of

hypothesis with

Delphi method

Conceptualization • Case

studies in

two or

three

metropolis

Implementation

•Refining the

theoretic part

we

summarized

Evaluation •Application,

prospects

and

limitations

of SASM

data in

spatiotempo

ral studies Conclusion

General structure of methodology

Hypothesis contrast via Delphi Method: However, there is possible that the assumption would be failed after thoroughly literature investigation, because there are uncertainties and complicated situation about this topic. In this case, the project may make a contrast of hypothesis through Delphi Method. It prepares to design a questionnaire for scholars of social media, to discuss some critical issues such as: 1)What is the definition of spatial-aware social media? 2) Should be the social media considered as a part of urban studies? 3) How do they consider the motivation that people tend to expose their geo-location to the public? And namely the hypothesis previously produced. Through the circulation of Delphi Method, it is reasonable believe that and the proposed hypothesis about SASM data and its relations with urban structure will be contrasted and further reformulated.

The specific methodology of Hypothesis

Methodology

Conceptual model for case study

The specific methodology of case study

Methodology

Stage I

Collected

SASM

data from

social

media

platform,

POIs

data

Semantic

Analysis

Motivatio

n study Method:

key-words

filter

Geo-

location

informatio

n

Method:

density-

based

clustering Comparing the data with official

data :

Distribution of demography,

Employment density

Social-economic attribute

Stage II Comparative study

between two or three metropolis

Methodology

The specific methodology of case study

1. Data collection:

-Proposed studied area:

Considering the probable biasness caused by cultural and social difference, the better way is

to choose two metropolis, one is from China and another is from Western nation. As the

studied area is heavily depend on the accessibility of social media data, the final study area

cannot be decided at the current stage.

-Possible data sources and data collection:

Primary data:

Based on the economic and technical limitations, the free and open resources are the

premium options. Therefore, public APIs would be an important tunnel of data collection.

POIs data from map services, social media data from Weibo or twitter are the data sources.

Secondary data:

Besides, it is also possible that we could get some official data about land uses and other

useful information from government.

The specific methodology of case study 2.Data analysis: The dataset will be depurated first. Next, these data will be analyzed from qualitative and quantitate views. It prepares to analyze data from two dimensions: -The traditional analysis of urban spatial pattern: Density of demography, Density of collected data, Centrality Land uses -The analysis of spatial statistics of SASM data: Spatial clustering of messages with geo-information in different time-period Spatial patterns are extracted from SASM data Spatial content analysis from the SASM data. Data visualization: Finally, the collected data will be visualized via Arcgis.

Methodology

VIABILITY Firstly, from the macro view of development of urban study, interdisciplinary researches has already become the mainstream trend. The future of urban study will be directed to human-based designing and long-term urban studies. Therefore, the topic of this proposal is at the forefront of urban study. Secondly, from the view of urban development in recent years, urban structure is still under the spotlight. The spatial pattern of urban growth influences on the efficiency of the city. Especially, the emergency of mega cities brings many challenges to the governors, such as pollutions and gentrification, etc. It is possible that urban development is entering a new era which is more complicated than ever before. Focusing on this field may contribute to the future urban management. Thirdly, in regard to the availability of the data, my master thesis has already used the data from open source of a social media platform. I have confidence in obtaining sufficient data for study. Moreover, there are more and more open data sources from government and Internet companies, which can be utilized in my project. After one year’s mastering training in UPC, I learned the required skills and methods to continue academic study. Both of my seminary research and the master thesis are related with utilizing “big data” to investigate cities. International comparison and interdisciplinary perspective will be my strong advantage during the study of PhD. Those investigations and academic programs I have involved in were related with sociology, urban geology and history. Besides, I have equipped with some basic knowledge in programming. These knowledge that I mastered and the academic experiences will help me to achieve the goals in PhD study.

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