Mapping the Data Shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the Sociospatial Dimensions of ‘Big Data’

Geoforum 52: 167-179, 2014

23 Pages Posted: 16 Jan 2014 Last revised: 5 Mar 2015

See all articles by Taylor Shelton

Taylor Shelton

Mississippi State University

Ate Poorthuis

Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Mark Graham

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Matthew Zook

University of Kentucky

Date Written: 2014

Abstract

Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.

Keywords: big data, geoweb, Hurricane Sandy, mixed methods, socio-spatial theory, Twitter

Suggested Citation

Shelton, Taylor and Poorthuis, Ate and Graham, Mark and Zook, Matthew, Mapping the Data Shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the Sociospatial Dimensions of ‘Big Data’ (2014). Geoforum 52: 167-179, 2014, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2379966

Taylor Shelton (Contact Author)

Mississippi State University

Mississippi State, MS 39762
United States

Ate Poorthuis

Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) ( email )

8 Somapah Road
Singapore, 487372
Singapore

Mark Graham

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://www.geospace.co.uk

Matthew Zook

University of Kentucky ( email )

Lexington, KY 40506
United States

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