Assessing spatial patterns using Chinese location-based social media: the case of Weibo-users' intercity connections in the Yangtze River Delta

There is a growing literature on location-based social media (LBSM) in geographical scholarship, which has paved the way for exploring human activities through spatially-embedded 'big data'. Geographic research using LBSM has itself been characterized by uneven partial patterns in that most studies deal with Europe and North America. This implies a relative dearth of studies focusing on regions such as China, and this in spite of the country having the largest number of Internet users in the world. This situation can above all be attributed to the fact that mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter are (made) unavailable in China. This paper proposes to address this lacuna by showing the research potential of LBSM services associated with Weibo, which is by far the most popular online social networking and microblogging service in China. In practice, we do so by presenting a concrete application, i.e. mapping intercity connections within the Yangtze River Delta by relational LBSM data derived from Weibo. The major aims of this paper are therefore (1) to examine a potential data source for geographic LBSM research in the Chinese context, (2) to assess exactly how Weibo can be used as a source for mapping geographic information, and, (3) to offer a starting point for discovering some of the geographies associated with Weibo users.