Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Geovisualising Unequal Spatial Distribution
of Online Social Network Connections: A
Hungarian Example
´
kos Jakobi and Bal
´
zs Lengyel
Introduction
Online social networks (OSN) are basically virtual creations, which stand for
expressing real life friendships in forms of virtual space acquaintance. They serve
also as major platforms of ICT-enabled communication, supporting place-
independent social life; however, recent findings suggest that geographical location
of users strongly affect network topology (Takhteyev et al.
2012
). As a matter of
fact OSNs may be related to locations, since the users themselves could be at large
geographically located as well. By retrieving geolocated data from the network-
database of an OSN it becomes possible both to visualise and to analyse geograph-
ical relations of participants.
Online social networks are large-scale networks from social network sites (SNS)
in which users are the nodes and their connections with other users are the edges.
SNSs are defined as web-based services that “enable users to articulate and make
visible their social networks” (Boyd and Ellison
2007
). The definition claims that
SNSs are supplemental forms of communication between people who have known
each other primarily in real life (Ellison et al.
2006
,
2007
). In other words, major
SNSs are not used to meet new people, but rather to articulate relationships with
people in their existing offline network. Furthermore, the tie-distribution of the
largest network (Facebook) is very close to multi-scaling behaviour of real-life
social networks (Ahn et al.
2007
; Backstrom et al.
2012
; Ugander et al.
2011
). It
