A Beginner’s Guide to Geographic Virtual Communities Research

Mining Geographic Information From Virtual Communities

Before engaging in any study involving the geographic component of virtual communities, it is necessary to obtain geographic information or to transform pre-existing geographic information into a “usable” form. Usable forms include latitude/longitude coordinates, bounding boxes around geographic features, and advanced polygonal and polylinear representations (e.g. the shape of the United States and the path of a road), along with the attribute information attached to these data, such as a username, population, etc.