Application of Social Media Data to High-Resolution Mapping of a Special Event Population

Society's increasing participation in social media provides access to new sources of near-real-time data that reflect our activities in space and in time. The ability for users to capture and express their geolocations through their phones' global positioning system (GPS), or through a particular location's hashtag or Facebook page, provides an opportunity for modeling spatiotemporal population dynamics. One illustrative application is the modeling of dynamic populations associated with special events such as sporting events. To demonstrate, Twitter posts and Facebook check-ins were collected across a 24 h period for several football game days at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, during the 2013 season. Population distributions for game hours and nongame hours of a typical game day were modeled at a high spatial resolution using the spatiotemporal distributions of the social media data.