A while back we used the concept of "Place" from Human Geography in a paper where we used the profile listing of where someone claims to be or be from. I've included the cite for the paper below. Yes, people do claim to be from Mars sometimes, like Libby says. I expect that is because they wish to preserve privacy or they just enjoy being silly. Both are ok in my book. And like Libby, I think if your methods take into consideration a certain amount of noise, then it should be fine. Unlike Dan, I'm not to worried about infringing on someone's privacy when using the place they list on their PUBLIC Twitter profile. Here is the paper I mentioned: Hemsley, J. J., & Eckert, J. (2014, January). Examining the role of" place" in twitter networks through the lens of contentious politics. In 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 1844-1853). IEEE. -----Original Message----- From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> On Behalf Of Gardner, Daniel via Air-L Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2023 3:34 PM To: Libby Hemphill <libbyh@umich.edu>; Shulman, Stu <stu@texifter.com> Cc: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Methods to infer Twitter data location Hi list, I have been having a nice chat with Deena about this, but given now a few technical responses to this query, I wanted to send to list. I would urge researchers in this space to make sure they are considering the immediate ethical dimensions of attempting to infer the physical locations of users who have, by their settings and practice explicitly said, "please don't know my location," especially if that location may in fact be their home... What that location becomes linked to in any data set produced, could potentially be deeply harmful, or at a minimum invasive. Best of luck, Dan From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Libby Hemphill via Air-L <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2023 at 12:13 PM To: Shulman, Stu <stu@texifter.com> Cc: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Methods to infer Twitter data location External Message [External Message] Depending on your tolerance for error and how specific you need the location to be, you may be able to use the user's location (from their profile, available through the users API if you still have access) rather than the tweet's geolocation. People usually tweet from "home". Libby On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 2:38 PM Shulman, Stu via Air-L < air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
User location on Twitter is very tricky and unreliable. Users must opt-in to share geo or to "claim" a location when they set up or edit their account profile. Claims of location range from 100% authentic to preposterous satirical banter and everything in between. Generally, if you restrict yourself to the study geo-located or location-purported data, you are looking at a small fraction of the whole dataset. For example, here are the top most common 30 "claimed" locations in a dataset of Tweets about "Dominion Voting Systems" from November 2020 where the most common from 421,000 Tweets is 15,000+ (United States) and the 30th is almost 700 (New York, NY). There are 239,051 purported locations in this dataset.
United States USA Texas, USA Florida, USA California, USA Texas Georgia, USA Canada Venezuela New York, USA Pennsylvania, USA Arizona, USA Los Angeles, CA Michigan, USA Ohio, USA North Carolina, USA Florida New Jersey, USA Washington, DC Houston, TX Virginia, USA California Tennessee, USA South Carolina, USA Atlanta, GA Washington, USA Earth Illinois, USA Chicago, IL New York, NY
To study data like this you may need to concatenate things that are similar but the same in practice at the geographical scale you are working with. Some locations are just Twitter handles. Others are Gab or Parler handles. Some look like this:
A Desk in Open Office Hell A Field of White Roses A Galaxy Far Away A Galaxy far far away A Galaxy far, far South A Garden of Feelings &Hot Air A Getsemani, Jerusalen
On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 11:32 AM Deena Abul-Fottouh via Air-L < air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
Hi aoir,
Could anyone please share resources on methods/applications to infer Twitter data locations from non-geo-located messages?
Thanks.
Deena
____________________________
Deena Abul-Fottouh, PhD.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Digital Society Lab
Political Science Department
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