A Survey on Visual Analytics for the Spatio-Temporal Exploration of Microblogging Content

User-generated content is a valuable source of information whose production increases year after year. Twitter data is a form of user-generated content that is frequently adopted to comment on life activities in several contexts. Thus, scientific interest in that data has increased in recent years. This paper focusses on visual analytics approaches addressing the microblogging content exchanged through Twitter. In particular, we concentrate our interest on approaches that consider spatial and temporal aspects and provide visual support. Articles from the major conferences, journals, and digital libraries have been collected, organized and compared based on different criteria such as research questions, application focus, analytical and visual methods adopted, and interaction provided. In addition to these comparisons, opportunities and challenges are illustrated to inspire future research. © 2017, Springer International Publishing.