Geospatial analysis of toponyms in geotagged social media posts
Loading...
Access rights
openAccess
CC BY
CC BY
publishedVersion
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
This publication is imported from Aalto University research portal.
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Unless otherwise stated, all rights belong to the author. You may download, display and print this publication for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Date
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
21
Series
PloS One, Volume 20, issue 6 JUNE, pp. 1-21
Abstract
Place names, or toponyms, play an integral role in human representation and communication of geographic space. In particular, how people relate each toponym with particular locations in geographic space should be indicative of their spatial perception. Here, we make use of an extensive dataset of georeferenced social media posts, retrieved from Twitter, to perform a statistical analysis of the geographic distribution of toponyms and uncover the relationship between toponyms and geographic space. We show that the occurrence of toponyms is characterized by spatial inhomogeneity, giving rise to patterns that are distinct from the distribution of common nouns. Using simple models, we quantify the spatial specificity of toponym distributions and identify their core-periphery structures. In particular, we find that toponyms are used with a probability that decays as a power law with distance from the geographic center of their occurrence. Our findings highlight the potential of social media data to explore linguistic patterns in geographic space, paving the way for comprehensive analyses of human spatial representations.Description
Publisher Copyright: © 2025 Hiraoka et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords
Other note
Citation
Hiraoka, T, Kirimura, T & Fujiwara, N 2025, 'Geospatial analysis of toponyms in geotagged social media posts', PloS One, vol. 20, no. 6 JUNE, e0325022, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325022