Cityscape: Volume 17 Number 1 | Article 12

The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies.

Cityscape is published three times a year by the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Urban Problems and Spatial Methods

Volume 17, Number 1

Mark D. Shroder

Michelle P. Matuga

Small Stories in Big Data: Gaining Insights From Large Spatial Point Pattern Datasets

Ate Poorthuis
Matthew Zook
University of Kentucky

With the onset of big data, it is now relatively easy to gain access to a wide variety and great magnitude of data sources. Data, however, do not necessarily equate to useful insights and meaningful analysis. In this article, we outline a specific step-by-step approach to gaining insight into the spatial footprint of online, point-based data—in this particular case, data from the popular social media service Twitter.