Social Media Big Data Acquisition and Analysis for Qualitative GIScience: Challenges and Opportunities

Qualitative geographic information systems (GIS) have come a long way since the original call from critical GIS scholars in the 1990s. The invention of the geoweb as well as big data sources for qualitative information have enabled qualitative GIS to actually be implemented. Academic researchers are now grappling with how best to engage with and use qualitative spatial data. Our focus is on using qualitative data from social media sources. We review the process of collecting and analyzing patterns based on qualitative spatial data using methods from GIScience as well as new techniques from computational linguistics. We review these methods through the lens of critical qualitative GIScience. We reflect critically on the ethics associated with implementation of social qualitative data. Qualitative GIS has reached a critical juncture where the data, methods, and tools have enabled new questions to be asked that were previously not possible to pose. In this article we look to provide guidance and clarity for researchers engaging with geo-social and spatial qualitative data.