Mapping ideas from cyberspace to realspace: visualizing the spatial context of keywords from web page search results

Abstract

We introduce a new method for visualizing and analyzing information landscapes of ideas and events posted on public web pages through customized web-search engines and keywords. This research integrates GIScience and web-search engines to track and analyze public web pages and their web contents with associated spatial relationships. Web pages searched by clusters of keywords were mapped with real-world coordinates (by geolocating their Internet Protocol addresses). The resulting maps represent web information landscapes consisting of hundreds of populated web pages searched by selected keywords. By creating a Spatial Web Automatic Reasoning and Mapping System prototype, researchers can visualize the spread of web pages associated with specific keywords, concepts, ideas, or news over time and space. These maps may reveal important spatial relationships and spatial context associated with selected keywords. This approach may provide a new research direction for geographers to study the diffusion of human thought and ideas. A better understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the ‘collective thinking of human beings’ over the Internet may help us understand various innovation diffusion processes, human behaviors, and social movements around the world.