Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences

Mapping our Connected World

David Abernathy, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473908185, 9781473908178
• eBook ISBN: 9781473965782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftliche Forschung & Methodik

"Abernathy provides a truly accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to geodata and geolocation covering both the conceptual and the practical. It is a must read for students or researchers looking to make the most of the spatial elements of their data" - Luke Sloan, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, Cardiff University

  Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences: Mapping our Connected World provides an engaging and accessible introduction to the Geoweb with clear, step-by-step guides for:

• Capturing Geodata from sources including GPS, sensor networks and Twitter
• Visualizing Geodata using programmes including QGIS, GRASS and R

Featuring colour images, practical exercises walking you through using data sources, and a companion website packed with resources, this book is the perfect guide for students and teachers looking to incorporate location-based data into their social science research.

1 Introduction The Power of Where

Overview

This chapter looks at:

• Maps, mobilities, and spaces of flows
• The connected age: location awareness and the “internet of things”
• Harnessing the geoweb
• The structure of the book

There are around 2 billion smartphones in the world, so chances are you own one of them. If so, think about the ways you might use your device during a vacation. As you plan your trip, you explore places and get driving directions using digital maps and imagery. On the road, you search out places to eat and refuel, paying attention to traffic information ahead in case you need to find an alternative route. Upon arrival, you consult a subway map to see where to go and when the next train will arrive. You take pictures and video of interesting sites and post them on Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps you decide to use the coupon that popped up on your smartphone screen when you walked by a particular shop. As you prepare to return home, you receive a notification that your flight has been slightly delayed and has changed gates. You check an airport map to find a restaurant close to the new gate, then use the extra time to look back at the map from yesterday’s hike to see exactly how many miles you walked. Once you have finally landed back at home, you wearily check your smartphone to see where it was you parked your car.

What is so remarkable about the above scenario is that it does not seem all that remarkable; you probably have done most of these things without giving them much thought. We have come to expect information to appear when and where we need it, and to be able to communicate with anyone at anytime, no matter where they are – something that Leisa Reichelt (2007) calls “ambient intimacy.” The normal barriers of space and time have seemingly been so reduced as to practically vanish. We can be on a video call, texting with a group of friends, and posting comments on social media sites (sometimes simultaneously!) without knowing or caring where all of those people happen to be.

But sometimes caring where those people are – or will be – is precisely the point. While the role that smartphones and social media played in social movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy is still under debate, these tools unquestionably ushered in a new way to coordinate the movement of individuals in geographic space. By having access to decentralized, immediate communication networks such as Twitter, networked groups can quickly mobilize in place and just as quickly dissipate. “Flash mob” protests can seemingly emerge out of nowhere, dissolve, and reappear elsewhere as networked protesters use ambient intimacy to keep track of each other as well as any potential threats.

Both the politically charged action of coordinating a protest across geographic space and the seemingly mundane task of mapping directions across town require the use of technological tools that have only recently emerged. Once confined to the relatively fixed position of desktop computers and mainframes, the internet has diffused to laptop computers, smartphones, and many other devices that are extremely mobile. Cellular networks, WiFi, Bluetooth® and other wireless forms of communication have allowed us to carry the internet with us almost everywhere we go. Global positioning systems tell us where we are on the face of the Earth with startling accuracy. We always have a location, and we always have access to the network. We live in a geoweb.

Broadly defined, the geoweb is a network of individual nodes whose geographic position can be identified and communicated on the internet. For something to be considered as part of the geoweb, it must be both geolocated and connected. Geolocation refers to the identification of the real-world location of some phenomenon, such as a smartphone, a car, or a tweet, using some sort of standard coding system. The most common coding system for geolocation is the coordinate system of latitude and longitude, but there are also many other systems used in geolocation (street addresses, ZIP codes, etc.). Connectivity simply means that geolocated phenomena must be connected to the internet in some way in order to be considered as part of the geoweb. Marking your location on the face of the Earth using a global positioning system (GPS) would not make you part of the geoweb, for example, unless that location was made accessible to other parts of the network (to determine your proximity to a certain subset of your friends, perhaps).

The geoweb also includes any data collected from a geolocated and connected node, from the speed of your car to your check-in on the Foursquare app to photosynthetically active radiation levels in a rainforest. Our definition of the geoweb can be expanded, then, to include what we can refer to as “geodata” – data that have some spatial or locational component. As such, the geoweb refers to a distributed digital network of geolocated nodes that capture, produce, and communicate data that include an explicitly spatial component.

The smartphone is an important and increasingly ubiquitous example of a geoweb node, but it is by no means the only one. Much of our physical world is rapidly being connected to the geoweb, from the scale of the individual (clothing, cars, homes) to the city (lighting systems in parking decks, motion sensors in roads and bridges) to entire ecosystems (rainforests, oceans). As such, we are gathering more and more data that can be analyzed and visualized geographically. The geoweb can help us better understand social activity in specific places – we might, for example, be interested in examining a set of Twitter and Facebook posts from a specific part of a city, or perhaps we would like to measure the fluctuation in air quality across an environmental sensor network. By generating data that are both geolocated and connected, we can begin to ask questions and seek answers that might otherwise be impossible.

This book is about the emerging geoweb and its implications for how we might go about asking such questions and seeking answers about the world around us. How can we take advantage of an increasingly geolocated and connected world to better understand human society and the environment? What tools can we use to collect and visualize geolocated data? How do we deal with issues of privacy, data accuracy, and fears of a “surveillance society” as the geoweb continues to grow and expand? In short, how will an emerging world in which everything is individually geolocated and globally networked change the way we interact with ourselves and our environment?

Maps, Mobilities, and Spaces of Flows

Humans have long sought to understand and visualize space and place in order to both make sense of the world and navigate through it. From early cave paintings to the cartography of the ancient Greeks to the National Geographic world maps on elementary school walls, maps have served as tools for describing the Earth. “Geography” first emerged with Eratosthenes, who calculated the size and shape of the Earth and developed a grid system for mapping places, and was formalized as an academic discipline in the eighteenth century. Today’s cartographers and geographers tend to use computers as they continue advancing our understanding of space and place.

The concepts of space and place are too important and powerful to be relegated to a single academic discipline, however. The power of “where” can be found across the arts and sciences, from disease diffusion models in epidemiology to the development of historical gazetteers in the digital humanities. Understanding and visualizing the “where” of almost any phenomena – the location, the proximity to other phenomena, the spatial distribution, the movement – can often help us better understand the “why.” As such, one can find a bewildering array of maps that have been created to help make sense of human society. From city zoning to political redistricting, from ethnicity to sexuality, and from wealth to health, space is a construct that humans use to organize, define, and differentiate themselves.

The emergence and widespread adoption of the internet, beginning in the 1990s, gave rise to a new way to conceptualize and visualize space. Made up of a rapidly expanding collection of interconnected computers, “cyberspace” emerged as a vast digital network that reconfigured society in myriad ways, including the ways in which space and place are constructed and interpreted. Suddenly nodes and networks were as important to our understanding of geography as the concepts of territories and borders, if not more so. The world shrank, in essence, as our global digital network enabled real-time communication without regard to physical distance. We became a network society.

Figure 1.1 Mapping cyberspace (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The sociologist Manuel Castells (2000) uses the term “space of flows” to describe the emergent social relations in a network society. More important than the space of places, he argues, is the movement (of information, capital, people, ideas) between places. While networks have been around for quite some time, Castells argues that during the 1970s we saw the emergence of new information technologies that have transformed society in unique ways. We now live and work within an integrated global network that ties together financial markets, media, employment, communication, and almost every other aspect of human life. Our digital networks reduce the “friction of distance,” in essence, allowing us to move more information across greater distances than ever before in human history. Our daily lives now take place in the midst of what Rainie and Wellman (2012) call a “new social operating system.”

As the social sciences came to terms with the internet and the network society in the 1990s, there was a growing realization that people, things, and ideas were more mobile than ever before. A “spatial turn” in the social sciences, and later the humanities, emerged as movement and mobility were recognized as being vital to the understanding of society. Rather than putting an “end to geography,” as some proclaimed global communication networks would accomplish, the emerging network society actually made geography more important, since it enabled movement and mobility like never before. Research across the breadth of academic disciplines sought to understand the spaces of flows as they accelerated across multiple networks.

The Connected Age: Location Awareness and the “Internet of Things”

On May 1, 2000, President Bill Clinton accepted a recommendation from the Department of Defense to end “selective availability,” an intentional degradation of location information provided by GPS satellites that was originally implemented for national security reasons. Overnight, GPS receivers improved locational accuracy from approximately 100 meters to less than 20 meters. Civilian use of GPS soon exploded, as GPS chips were included in everything from mobile phones to car navigation systems to farm equipment. The amount of geolocated data being generated increased dramatically.

At around the same time, the internet was limping through the first dot-com market collapse but nevertheless was maturing as a revolutionary tool for communication and information distribution. Mobile phones were on their way to becoming the most rapidly adopted consumer technology in history, as emerging 3G data speeds allowed users to access the growing internet with their mobile devices. Computer processing chips and sensors of all types were becoming more powerful even as they were shrinking and dropping in cost.

By around 2002 or so, these three network technologies (global positioning systems, cellular communication, and the internet) were integrated enough to give us the foundations of the geoweb. For the first time in history, we had the ability to identify an exact location on the face of the Earth, link that location to the internet (often using mobile devices and cellular communication) and begin examining its relationship with other surrounding phenomena. And as technology continued to advance, we began to see more and more geolocated and connected nodes being added to the geoweb.

In the years since the geoweb first emerged, there has been tremendous growth in the amount of location-based data being generated. From digital maps and imagery used in geographic information systems (GIS) to digital photographs that have been “geotagged” to animals tagged with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, geodata have rapidly proliferated. The geoweb continues to evolve as the internet spreads ever further into the physical world and as the amount of data generated increases markedly. The geoweb, then, is an important part of two larger trends in our present-day digital society: the era of “big data” and the emerging “internet of things” (IoT).

The internet of things refers to the expansion of the internet beyond computers and mobile phones to other aspects of the physical world. Today, objects such as cash registers, lighting systems, bridges, and thermostats are connected to the internet, and they are generating data, responding to changes in their environments, and often accessible to users on the network. Nodes on the IoT are not necessarily part of the geoweb, since there may be applications that do not require geolocation, but quite often geolocation is an integral component. An estimated 26 billion things (not including computers and phones) will be connected to the internet by 2020 (Gartner, 2013), and many of these will be incorporated into the geoweb as they utilize geolocation data in important ways.

The proliferation of these devices, coupled with an ever-increasing capacity for data storage, has resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of data being captured and stored each year. “Big data” has emerged in recent years as the broad term for our realization that we are increasingly awash in data and that we need to find ways to effectively harness them in order to improve our decision-making capabilities. Geodata are not inherently big data, but often we see large-scale sensor networks or complex GIS datasets that are so large as to challenge our existing tools for analysis, storage, and visualization. Also, as the IoT continues to expand, it seems likely that organizing data spatially will be increasingly important.

Harnessing the Geow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• About the Author
• Companion Website
• 1 Introduction The Power of Where
• Part One The Geoweb in Context
• 2 A Brief History of the Geoweb
• 3 “Big Geodata” Managing Spatial Data in a Connected Age
• 4 Citizen Cartographers Neogeography, VGI and the Democratization of Data Production
• 5 Challenges of the Geoweb Data Accuracy, Privacy, and Surveillance
• 6 Introduction to Geodata: Types of Geodata How Do We Identify and Gather Location-Based Data?
• Part Two Capturing and Visualizing Geodata
• 7 Capturing Absolute Location with the Global Positioning System
• 8 Geocoding, Geotagging, and Geoparsing
• 9 Social Media Geodata Capturing Location-Based Twitter Data
• 10 Mapping the Emerging Internet of Things
• 11 Visualizing Data in Geographic Information Systems with QGIS
• 12 Working with Geodata in GRASS
• 13 Working with Geodata in R
• 14 Web Mapping
• 15 Epilogue Weaving the Geoweb
• References
• Index