Daniel Z. Sui

Bio: Daniel Z. Sui is an academic researcher from Ohio State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social media & Volunteered geographic information. The author has an hindex of 36, co-authored 95 publications receiving 5968 citations. Previous affiliations of Daniel Z. Sui include National Science Foundation & Virginia Tech.

Exploring Millions of Footprints in Location Sharing Services

Abstract: Location sharing services (LSS) like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places support hundreds of millions of user-driven footprints (i.e., "checkins"). Those global-scale footprints provide a unique opportunity to study the social and temporal characteristics of how people use these services and to model patterns of human mobility, which are significant factors for the design of future mobile+location-based services, traffic forecasting, urban planning, as well as epidemiological models of disease spread. In this paper, we investigate 22 million checkins across 220,000 users and report a quantitative assessment of human mobility patterns by analyzing the spatial, temporal, social, and textual aspects associated with these footprints. We find that: (i) LSS users follow the “Levy Flight” mobility pattern and adopt periodic behaviors; (ii) While geographic and economic constraints affect mobility patterns, so does individual social status; and (iii) Content and sentiment-based analysis of posts associated with checkins can provide a rich source of context for better understanding how users engage with these services.

Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice

Abstract: The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interfaces to mark and annotate geographic features, or adding geographic location to photographs, text, and other media shared online. These phenomena, which generate what we refer to collectively as volunteered geographic information (VGI), represent a paradigmatic shift in how geographic information is created and shared and by whom, as well as its content and characteristics. This article, which draws on our recently completed inventory of VGI initiatives, is intended to frame the crucial dimensions of VGI for geography and geographers, with an eye toward identifying its potential in our field, as well as the most pressing research needed to realize this potential. D...

The convergence of GIS and social media: challenges for GIScience

Abstract: It is hard to believe that 10 years have passed since we wrote our guest editorial for IJGIS (Sui and Goodchild 2001). Using the nascent evidence that emerged in the late 1990s, we speculated back in 2001 that geographic information systems (GIS) were rapidly becoming part of the mass media. On the basis of the proposition of GIS as media, we were able to link GIScience with theories in media studies such as Marshall McLuhan's law of the media, which considers modern media as modifiable perceptive extensions of human thought (Sui and Goodchild 2003). Remarkable conceptual and technological advances in GIS have been made during the past 10 years. The goal of this review is to provide an update on the ‘GIS as media’ argument we made 10 years ago and to discuss the new challenges for GIScience posed by the growing convergence of GIS and social media.

Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice

Abstract: The phenomenon of volunteered geographic information is part of a profound transformation in how geographic data, information, and knowledge are produced and circulated. By situating volunteered geographic information (VGI) in the context of big-data deluge and the data-intensive inquiry, the 20 chapters in this book explore both the theories and applications of crowdsourcing for geographic knowledge production with three sections focusing on 1). VGI, Public Participation, and Citizen Science; 2). Geographic Knowledge Production and Place Inference; and 3). Emerging Applications and New Challenges. This book argues that future progress in VGI research depends in large part on building strong linkages with diverse geographic scholarship. Contributors of this volume situate VGI research in geographys core concerns with space and place, and offer several ways of addressing persistent challenges of quality assurance in VGI. This book positions VGI as part of a shift toward hybrid epistemologies, and potentially a fourth paradigm of data-intensive inquiry across the sciences. It also considers the implications of VGI and the exaflood for further time-space compression and new forms, degrees of digital inequality, the renewed importance of geography, and the role of crowdsourcing for geographic knowledge production.

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Abstract: From the Publisher: A Question of Identity Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

Thinking fast and slow.

Abstract: In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.