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The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology
Big Data & Society ( IF 8.731 ) Pub Date : 2020-07-01 , DOI: 10.1177/2053951720978485
Margath A Walker 1 , Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah 2
Affiliation  

The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visualizations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study—the migrant caravan—can further inform analyses of Big Data.

中文翻译:

#migrantcaravan 的数字生活:将 Twitter 情境化为一种空间技术

2018 年的中美洲移民大篷车最好被理解为是由美国、墨西哥、危地马拉、洪都拉斯和萨尔瓦多之间纠缠不清的多尺度地缘政治历史促成的。不出所料,向北前往美国的移民在社交媒体上引起了广泛关注。以至于对大篷车的反应加速了向美国南部边境部署军队并剥夺中美洲人寻求庇护的机会的计划。这个例子展示了数字世界如何产生指数级的物质效应。虽然对边境安全和移民的报道很广泛,但在政治地理范围内,这种担忧很少与社交媒体联系在一起。在本文中,我们将移民大篷车的数字化或“数字生活”作为我们的分析对象。映射与移民大篷车相关的推文模式,并结合对 Twitter 网络维度的探索,揭示了该平台从根本上是一种空间技术。Twitter 不是反射、折射或扭曲,而是通过空间机制产生和(它的力量)反过来产生。我们提供了多种制图可视化来支持这一主张,并强调了所研究主题(移民大篷车)的上下文知识可以进一步为大数据分析提供信息的方式。
更新日期:2020-07-01
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