Spatializing Social Media

Marco Bastos is the University College Dublin Ad Astra Fellow at the School of Information and Communication Studies and Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. His research leverages computational methods and network science to explore the intersection of communication and critical data studies.

"Comprehensive and insightful, Spatializing Social Media provides a fascinating, in-depth analysis of the relationship between the social, spatial and virtual, and the confluence and divergence of social networks on- and offline. Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the societal and spatial operations and impacts of social media." -- Rob Kitchin, Professor of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland"Spatializing Social Media provides an original and highly promising framework for the analysis of social media by focusing on the spatial patterns of digital interactions. This place-based perspective is bound to deepen our understanding of the role and effects of digital media in social life. By providing his readers with instructive case studies and a ready-made analytical tool kit, Bastos has made his book into the natural origin point of a new wave of studies with and on social media." -- Andreas Jungherr, Professor for Digital Transformation and Publics at University of Jena, Germany"By focusing on theoretically grounded suggestions about what we as researchers can actually do once we get our hands on data, the perspectives contained in this book should remain valid for a long stretch of time. Spatializing Social Media appears as more than a methods book, much like it reads as more than theoretical account." -- Anders Olaf Larsson, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Kristiania University College, Norway"The idea that network analysis and geographic relationships are close cousins has long been understood, but the details of laying bare these relationships are too often addressed with hand-waving. Hidden beneath the title of Bastos’s new book is a thorough exploration of the ways in which networked approaches can be employed to provide a much better understanding of flows in online and offline spaces. The broad theoretical and practical approaches will provide the casual reader a sophisticated introduction to networked spaces, while leaving much to engage more experienced scholars as well." -- Alexander Halavais, Associate Professor of Critical Data Studies at Arizona State University, United States of America

• Funding Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction SECTION ILocal and digital: the dyadic interaction of social and virtual 1 Place and space 2 Face-to-face and online communities 3 From global village to identity tribes SECTION IISocial and spatial networks: the dyadic interaction of virtual and spatial 4 Network spillover 5 Social networks 6 Spatial analysis SECTION IIISocial networks online and offline: the dyadic interaction of social and spatial 7 Spatial and social media data 8 Online-offline coordination 9 The directionality of homophily SECTION IVMapping online to offline social networks: bridging geography and geodesy 10 Network layouts by geodesy and geography 11 Methods in spatial statistics for social networks 12 An R package for spatializing social media Conclusion Index of names Index of subjects