New Forms of (Spatial) Data

Tied into the (geo-)data revolution, new sources are appearing that are:

• Accidental –> created for different purposes but available for analysis as a side effect
• Very diverse in nature, resolution, and quality but, potentially, much more detailed in both space and time

Different ways to categorise them…

Lazer & Radford (2017)

• Digital life: digital actions (Twitter, Facebook, WikiPedia…)
• Digital traces: record of digital actions (CDRs, metadata…)
• Digitalised life: nonintrinsically digital life in digital form (Government records, web…)

Arribas-Bel (2014)

Three levels, based on how they originate:

• Bottom up: “Citizens as sensors”
• Intermediate: Digital businesses/businesses going digital
• Top down: Open Government Data

Opportunities (Lazer & Radford, 2017)

• Massive, passive
• Nowcasting
• Data on social systems
• Natural and field experiments (“always-on” observatory of human behaviour)
• Making big data small

Challenges (Arribas-Bel, 2014)

• Bias
• Technical barriers
• Methodological “mismatch”