Visualisation of most frequently posted locations on social media based on web map

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile internet technology, location-based services have become the mainstream in people’s daily life and a large amount of social media data containing geographic location information has been generated.

This study develops a new method of extracting and utilising geographical data from geotagged media posts on the popular social media site, Instagram.

Information including latitude and longitude and the time of the post is extracted and passed to a web mapping application, which shows the places that the Instagram user has been to and gives information about the places the user has posted about most frequently. This web application creates benefit for Instagram users because it visualises all the locations when the Instagram posts are generated on one map and shows the user’s preferences of tourism behaviour. In this study, user’s travel histories are displayed on the map as they may recall memories of each geotagged post. We argue that analysing their Instagram posts geographically, may help users to recall the places they have already been to, and the order and the frequency of their visits to different places. This geographical method of organising their media may also be more helpful for them when they are planning future travel itineraries. The web map can be accessed via: https://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~s1831663/.