Title
SocialWave: Visual Analysis of Spatio-temporal Diffusion of Information on Social Media.
Abstract
Rapid advancement of social media tremendously facilitates and accelerates the information diffusion among users around the world. How and to what extent will the information on social media achieve widespread diffusion across the world? How can we quantify the interaction between users from different geolocations in the diffusion process? How will the spatial patterns of information diffusion change over time? To address these questions, a dynamic social gravity model (SGM) is proposed to quantify the dynamic spatial interaction behavior among social media users in information diffusion. The dynamic SGM includes three factors that are theoretically significant to the spatial diffusion of information: geographic distance, cultural proximity, and linguistic similarity. Temporal dimension is also taken into account to help detect recency effect, and ground-truth data is integrated into the model to help measure the diffusion power. Furthermore, SocialWave, a visual analytic system, is developed to support both spatial and temporal investigative tasks. SocialWave provides a temporal visualization that allows users to quickly identify the overall temporal diffusion patterns, which reflect the spatial characteristics of the diffusion network. When a meaningful temporal pattern is identified, SocialWave utilizes a new occlusion-free spatial visualization, which integrates a node-link diagram into a circular cartogram for further analysis. Moreover, we propose a set of rich user interactions that enable in-depth, multi-faceted analysis of the diffusion on social media. The effectiveness and efficiency of the mathematical model and visualization system are evaluated with two datasets on social media, namely, Ebola Epidemics and Ferguson Unrest.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3106775
ACM TIST
Keywords
Field
DocType
Spatio-temporal visualization, information diffusion, social media visualization
Diffusion process,Data mining,Social media,Geographical distance,Computer science,Visualization,Diagram,Cartogram,Gravity model of trade,Spatial ecology
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
9
2
2157-6904
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.37
33
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guo-Dao Sun117111.24
Tan Tang2344.36
Tai-Quan Peng3747.82
Ronghua Liang437642.60
Yingcai Wu5122361.26