Spring 2016 Brown Bag Series: Dr. Yuan Gao

Spring 2016 Brown Bag Speaker Series
Exploring Spatial-temporal Patterns of Tourist Activity Using Social Media

Dr. Yuan Gao
Associate Professor and Researcher, Northwest University, China
Visiting Scholar, Spatial Sciences Institute

12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Friday, March 25, 2016
Allan Hancock Foundation (AHF) B57J

Modern museums not only provide people with a place to learn new knowledge but also serve as popular tourist destinations. Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns and profiles of museum visitors is essential for urban planning, transport management, and tourism administration. In this talk, I will first introduce our previous project named “Enjoy Museum”. In this project, we designed and implemented a mobile application that integrates museum information into a unified platform. By using this application, museum visitors can obtain the latest museum and exhibition information near their current location and publish comments after their visit. The application also collects user locations and trajectories (if the user agrees to share this information) that can be used to examine visiting patterns of individual museums and visitor profiles. Next, I will describe a current project that aims to portray the collective spatial attention of museum visitors using Twitter datasets collected from 2015/08/31 to 2016/02/29. We first filter the collected tweets using museum names and then trace the trajectories of visitors to identify spatial relationships between Twitter users and individual museums mentioned in their tweets. In sum, I will demonstrate that social media data have a high potential for modeling spatial behaviors in a case study of data visualization for analyzing the mobility and activity of museum visitors.