On Estimating The Geographic Distribution of Social Media

Matthew Hurst, Matthew Siegler and Natalie Glance

Many social media platforms allow the user to provide profile information. This information is generally presented in a semi-structured manner either on a profile page or on the weblog home page itself. This paper describes a novel wrapper induction method that extracts profile data. Our ultimate goal is to estimate the geographic distribution of weblog authors and to that end we provide an analysis of the location information discovered for each author in a large database of weblog posts.

Full Paper

Available as PDF