The Opportunities and Challenges with Social Media and Big Data for Research in Human Dynamics

Abstract

Geographers and scientists can collect and analyze social media and Big Data via smartphones, sensors, and mobile devices with locational contents, such as global positioning system tags, check-ins, place names, and user location profiles. The dynamic characteristics of social media and Big Data offer geographers research opportunities for examining and modeling human behaviors, communications, and movements. To discuss this emerging research themes in the field of geography and GIScience, a series of special paper sessions were organized at AAG annual meetings in 2015 and 2016, Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age: Linking Physical and Virtual Spaces and Symposium on Human Dynamics Research: Social Media and Big Data. This short viewpoint paper first reports on a summary of papers presented in these AAG sessions. Then we discuss the current state-of-the-arts in human dynamics research and highlight their key concepts, opportunities, and challenges.