Follow thy neighbor: Connecting the social and the spatial networks on Twitter

Trace of pace, place, and space in personal relationships: The chronogeometrics of studying relationships at scale

“…Consistent with Dunbar's number, social networks are constrained by the number of social relationships that can be functionally sustained, typically between 80 and 300 nodes (Arnaboldi et al, ; LaRose et al, ; Liang & Fu, ; Mac Carron et al, ; Miritello, Lara, et al, ; Sandel et al, ; M. Stephens & Poorthuis, ; cf., Manago, Taylor, & Greenfield, ; Wellman, ). In addition to support from research on ordinary social networks (e.g., Dunbar & Sosis, ), various studies of mediated network topologies have tended to support these ranges of social ties (Arnaboldi et al, ).…”

“…This finding appears consistent with research of over 3 million Facebook users and over 30 million edges or links among them, which found that “at medium to long‐range distances, the probability of friendship is roughly inversely proportional to distance,” although “people who live in urban areas tend to have more dispersed friends” (Backstrom, Sun, & Marlow, , p. 65). Similarly, in a study of 400 Twitter user networks comprising over 55,000 unique others with approximately 4.5 million ties, M. Stephens and Poorthuis (, p. 92) found that, as network size increases, its density (i.e., the proportion of relationships among alters) “drops off dramatically” ( rho = −.40), indicating “a decay in network density as physical distance increases. Distance strongly impacts the social clustering of networks at shorter distances while leveling out after about 2,000 km (roughly the distance from Boston, MA to Chicago, IL).”…”

Examining the Role of "Place" in Twitter Networks through the Lens of Contentious Politics

“…Outside of geography's disciplinary silo lies a network analysis that suggests Twitter @-mention networks are best modeled against airplane traffic data [54]. This work is further expanded by geographers examining triadic network structures, relating geographic distance to the strong and weak ties posited by Grannovetter [23,53].…”

“…Of course, this isn't necessarily an accurate representation of place either [53]. However, we do have a set of place-based hashtags that represent each given occupy location with which to triangulate these user definitions.…”

How big is the digital divide between rural and urban areas in Poland?

“…this is one of the basic aspects of spatial variation of the widely-discussed phenomenon of the digital divide. the phenomenon is a subject of various spatial analyses which focus on the infrastructure, the social and economic structure of the internet users (Schwanen and kwan 2008;Stephens and poorthuis 2015;Warf 2001), and the uneven distribution of access to the internet between rural and urban areas and between regions and countries (chakraborty and bosman 2005;grubesic 2006;grubesic and murray 2002;Whitacre and mills 2007). the digital divide is subject to constant changes amid the rapid development of the internet and the increasing importance of the Web in everyday life.…”