Geospatiality: the effect of topics on the presence of geolocation in English text data

Kurzfassung

Geolocated text data are a promising data source for spatial analyses in many fields, from disease surveillance to the spatial humanities. This study investigates the relationship between texts’ thematic categories and their likelihood of containing usable geolocation information by quantifying and modelling this relationship across seven diverse English text datasets of different types, including web forums, microblogs, news, and magazines. We find that the likelihood of geoinformation is highly variant, being high for the category ‘Travel, Tourism & Migration’ and low for ‘Private Life, Family & Relationships’. The rank-correlation of this likelihood between datasets is moderate to strong. These findings indicate that the topic plays a significant role in determining the frequency of geospatial references within the text, and that the effect is not entirely dataset-specific. This contributes to the empirical study of the concept of spatiality and provides valuable insights for bias mitigation in the increasing use of text as data for spatial analyses.