Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusions
Online social networks have been opened new opportunities for empirical
research and of high probability will count for a growing share of scientific
interest aiming closer understanding of online communication and human
development. In this paper we presented an initial attempt in establishing a
geography-related research line in this promising field of interdisciplinary
focus. With a special emphasis on geovisualisation of unequal spatial distri-
bution of network connections we tried to look behind the data and to
discover geospatial characteristics of OSN performance.
We demonstrated here that OSNs are definitely place-dependent, because
many aspects of network connectivity happened to show geographical relat-
edness as well. By mapping the strongest and most important settlement-to-
settlement connections it turned out that distance does significantly matter in
network formation. Although OSNs are virtual space creations, it seems that
offline factors of settlement size and location still have decisive effects in
network connections.
Acknowledgments Research work of ´ kos Jakobi was supported by the J ´ nos Bolyai Scholar-
ship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Bal´zs Lengyel acknowledges financial support of
IBS Research Grant.
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