Session S
Web Data for Longitudinal Research on Populations and Territories
Facilitators: Romain LECONTE (Géographie-cités), Antoine PERIS (Delft University of Technology) & Marta SEVERO (Dicen-IDF)
Over the past few years, Web data has become an interesting source to study territories and populations in different domains: mobility, metropolitan dynamics, social and territorial representations, etc. Digital methods have contributed to the emergence of analyses that take into account the digital dimension of these sources. However, for territorial sciences it is also important to take into account the temporal dimension when studying the evolution of populations and territories.
This session will address two main issues:
- Temporal series and volatility of the Web. Deriving longitudinal data from the Web can be done by collecting information in real time (social media, RSS feeds, Web scraping, etc.) or by using Web archives. In both cases, it is necessary to overcome certain methodological issues: the exponential growth of content (i.e. with collaborative databases), the instability of ontologies (i.e. the issue of folksonomy) and the necessity of maintaining a data collection structure that tracks the evolution of the medium and can handle the rapidly growing size of the data.
- Deriving social and spatial indicators from the Web. To what extent is it possible to generate spatial information beyond geotags, for instance from the textual content? How might we gain an understanding of social dynamics from platforms that have little information about users and limited repetitiveness? Temporal aggregation and the construction of indicators to monitor population samples are very difficult with such data.
Proposals should indicate methodological and technical approaches for building and evaluating longitudinal Web databases (all kinds of sources like social media, websites and RSS, collaborative datasets, digital archives, etc.) and their theoretical implications (data paper format).
Indicative bibliographical references
Maisonobe M., Grossetti M., Milard B., Eckert D., Jégou L., 2016, « L’évolution mondiale des réseaux de collaborations scientifiques entre villes : des échelles multiples », Revue française de sociologie, 57(3), p. 417-441.
Meyer E. T., Yasseri T., Hale S. A., Cowls J., Schroeder R., Margetts H., 2017, “Analysing the UK Web Domain and Exploring 15 Years of UK Universities on the Web”, in R. Schroeder & N. Brügger (dir.), The Web as History. Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present, UCL Press, p. 23-44.
Miller H. J., Goodchild, M. F., 2015, “Data-Driven Geography”, GeoJournal, 80(4), 449-461.
Rogers R., 2013, Digital methods, MIT press.
Severo M., Romele A. (dir.), 2017, Traces numériques et territoires, Paris, Presses des Mines.
Shelton T., Poorthuis A., Zook M., 2015, “Social Media and the City: Rethinking Urban Socio-Spatial Inequality Using User-Generated Geographic Information”, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 142, p. 198-211.
Download the elements of the call for papers for this session
Session/Sesión S - Leconte, Peris, Severo (pdf)
Appel à communications/Call for papers/Convocatoria a comunicationes (pdf)
fichier modèle avec les instructions/template with instructions/archivo con las instrucciones (docx)
