Collecting, analyzing, and visualizing location-based social media data: review of methods in GIS-social media analysis

With billions of active users, social media platforms now generate spatial data on a massive scale, which presents researchers with opportunities to use this data in new and innovative ways. There is a body of literature within which location-based social media data have been used as a means to spatially analyze certain phenomenon. Due to the low cost, high availability, and extreme ranges of content and geographic coverage, location-based social media data have the potential to play a major role in GIS research. To this end, our review maps the field of evidence as it relates to the methods used by GIS researchers to collect, spatially analyze, and cartographically visualize location-based social media data. The results are informed by 222 articles that utilize spatial social media for a wide variety of purposes and GIS-based analyses. Findings were organized according to a typical GIS workflow and are presented to give the reader an operationalized understanding of each step in the workflow. Collection strongly favoured platforms like Twitter and Flickr, and similar to methods analysis were dictated either by content or locational data attributes. Data visualization was achieved through discrete, continuous, and transmission surfaces.