What can location-based social media reveal on human migration patterns in Europe?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Numerous visualisation methods have been proposed, including Origin-Destination maps to represent movement patterns gathered from social media; however, visual clutter remains a persistent issue due to complex data dimensionality. Besides, most Origin-Destination maps fail to illustrate the temporal dimension of social network phenomena within the geographical environment. To tackle this issue, we propose the visualisation method for geo-located Facebook social-media data while emphasising the time aspect. Based on the citizen-generated data for the European Union (EU), we estimated the EU citizens’ residing or travelling across the EU member states as a means of current and previous destinations to reveal the extent of the hypothetical human migration. The proposed methodology consists of Origin-Destination maps implemented within the time geography framework as a model to support the process of analysis for decision-making. The generated visualisation allows comprehension of the scale of human movement distribution internally within the EU from a space–time perspective.