Tantoush, M., 2023.

Crowdsourced Urban data, Self-Organisation and Emergence: A bottom-up Analytics Approach Using Tweets

Digital technologies such as GPS enabled mobile phones and social media platforms are becoming part of everyday life. Previously, digital technologies and the internet was used for information retrieval and browsing content, but has now evolved into user generated and interactive interfaces: a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Due to this, digital technologies and their mediating influence on daily activities have become intertwined merging digital and urban space into a relational and multidimensional hybrid spaces. By combining the perspectives of complexity and digital geography, this paper aims at reviewing different data sources and their application for research to better understand their utility in understanding different urban phenomena. Current approaches to big data analysis overlook a critical step in critically examining the utility of data given how people use the platform and how the platform/interface is designed. In order to achieve this, different crowdsourced data are reviewed from their generating mechanisms perspective and research use, and then contextualised through a complexity framing of emergence and self-organisation. The paper will then conclude with results of ongoing PhD research work analysing urban activities through twitter data in Greater Manchester.