Spatial Analysis of Social Media Content (Tweets) during the 2012 U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries

Social media (such as Twitter and Facebook) are powerful communication platforms for idea exchange, breaking news (Sankaranarayanan et al. 2009), personal networking (Lerman and Ghosh 2010), political opinions (An et al. 2011), and collective actions (Earl 2010). By using smart phones, personal computers, and mobile devices, people can communicate and coordinate their activities geospatially, and to a significant degree, to accomplish these social communication functions in near-real time. The impacts of these tools were so vividly demonstrated in the most recent anti-government protests, including the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the London Riots. The rich information available in social media can now be monitored, traced, and analyzed in ways that may assist researchers understanding of various diffusion processes, human behaviors, and the collective moods around the world (Golder and Macy 2011).