The Spatial Dimension in Social Media Analysis

Abstract

In the data revolution era, the availability of “voluntary” and “derived from social media” geographic information allowed the spatial dimension to gain attention in digital and web studies. The purpose of this work is to recognize the impact of this research stream on some methodological and theoretical issues. The first regards “critical algorithm studies” in order to understand what algorithms are used. The second concerns how these works conceive the space. The last two issues concern the disciplinary areas in which these researches take place and which are the ecological units taken into account. The authors answer these questions by analyzing, through a content analysis, the researches extracted with the PRISMA methodology that have used Twitter as a data source. The application of this procedure allows the authors to classify the analysis material, moving simultaneously on the four defined dimensions.