Abstract
In geography, the concept of “rhizome” provides a theoretical tool to conceive the way people move in space in terms of “mobility networks”: the space lived by people is delimited and characterized on the basis of both the places they visited and the sequences of their transfers from place to place. Researchers are now wondering whether in the new era of data-driven geography it is possible to give a concrete shape to the concept of rhizome, by analyzing big data describing movement of people traced through social media. This paper is a first attempt to give a concrete shape to the concept of rhizome, by interpreting it as a problem of “itemset mining”, which is a well-known data mining technique. This technique was originally developed for market-basket analysis. We studied how the application of this technique, if supported by adequate visualization strategies, can provide geographers with a concrete shape for rhizomes, suitable for further studies. To validate the ideas, we chose the case study of tourists visiting a city: the rhizome can be conceived as the set of places visited by many tourists, and the common transfers made by tourists in the area of the city. Itemsets extracted from a real-life data set were used to study the effectiveness of both a topographic representation and a topological representation to visualize rhizomes. In this paper, we study how three different interpretations are actually able to give a concrete and visual shape to the concept of rhizome. The results that we present and discuss in this paper open further investigations on the problem.
Highlights
The massive production of personal data, thanks to the diffusion of the Internet, social media and location-based services, could be exploited in order to gather information about mobility of citizens
Researchers are wondering whether in the new era of data-driven geography it is possible to give a concrete shape to the concept of rhizome, by analyzing big data describing movement of people traced through social media
If geographers and spatial analysts were provided with traces of tourists that visited a given city or territory, derived from geo-located messages that tourists posted on social media, they could try to understand how tourists experienced the territory, so as to reveal important drivers that are able to attract tourists
Summary
The massive production of personal data, thanks to the diffusion of the Internet, social media and location-based services, could be exploited in order to gather information about mobility of citizens. If geographers and spatial analysts were provided with traces of tourists that visited a given city or territory, derived from geo-located messages that tourists posted on social media, they could try to understand how tourists experienced the territory, so as to reveal important drivers that are able to attract tourists. This kind of analysis is quite important for small and tourist-oriented cities, whose administrators would like to increase the number of tourists. Bruno Latour claimed that this division needs to be overcome; the perspective is the world as it presents itself to us in the form of networks, relations and hybrids that cross the artificial boundaries drawn between culture and nature, and between the worlds of people and of things (for a clear analysis of the Actor-Network Theory, see [8,9,10,11,12])
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