Abstract
Geotagged tweets, Foursquare check-ins and other forms of volunteered geographic information (VGI) play a critical role in numerous studies and a large range of intelligent technologies. We show that three of the most commonly used sources of VGI - Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare - are biased towards urban perspectives at the expense of rural ones. Utilizing a geostatistics-based approach, we demonstrate that, on a per capita basis, these important VGI datasets have more users, more information, and higher quality information within metropolitan areas than outside of them. VGI is a subset of user-generated content (UGC) and we discuss how our results suggest that urban biases might exist in non-geographically referenced UGC as well. Finally, because Foursquare is exclusively made up of VGI, we argue that Foursquare (and possibly other location-based social networks) has fundamentally failed to appeal to rural populations.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2014 |
Publisher | AAAI press |
Pages | 197-205 |
Number of pages | 9 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781577356578 |
State | Published - 2014 |
Event | 8th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2014 - Ann Arbor, United States Duration: Jun 1 2014 → Jun 4 2014 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2014 |
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Other
Other | 8th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2014 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Ann Arbor |
Period | 6/1/14 → 6/4/14 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.