Studying the Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Small-Scale Events in Twitter

Small-scale events are emerging as attractive objects of research. On Twitter, small-scale events represent weak sensors that report things happening in specific times and places. While previous work addressed the issue of detecting such events, very little is known so far about their inherent properties. In this paper, our main objective was to analyse the spatio-temporal peculiarities of small-scale events w.r.t different levels of location granularity, and to understand the general trend of their propagation along their lifetimes. Our findings suggest that (1) users involved in small-scale events mostly gravitate not significantly far from the geographical focus; (2) events do not exhibit major peaks; and (3) there exists distinct events that we can identify from users' posts that significantly differ from topic distribution, focus concentration and propagation distance perspectives across time.