Mhealth policy conversations in social media are generating lots of data, but what can this tell us about the actors, their networked relationships or their investment in formal policy processes?

The Moving Media  project has been exploring social network analysis of mhealth tagged tweets to better understand the informal policy networks that are developing on Twitter – but we’ve come up with some big questions about the analytical processes we’re using.

So we’d like to start a discussion about some of the challenges of doing SNA and network visualisations with this type of data, including things like:

• The types of tools that DH are using for SNA (Gephi vs Node XL)
• How to slice big data
• How to locate the data across maps
• How to automate the data scraping process
• How to share the data back with the users

We’d also like to know what you’re doing in this space and what discoveries you’ve made.

Geo-located social media provide a unique blend of information about society and place, extending volunteer geographic information models to form crowd-sourced people-centric data platforms. We propose a discussion around the use of geolocated social media in different disciplines.

The SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong has developed a suite of tools, based on open software, for Twitter data analysis which we can present to kickstart conversations. It would be great to have some other presenters too.

Geolocated tweets from around Australia

Interesting things we could discuss:

• How can we use geo-located social media to better understand the relationships between people and the urban environment?
• What is the role of social media during emergencies?
• Discussion on the technologies available to capture, analyse and visualise GeoSocial data.

Interested to hear your thoughts – all suggestions welcome!