Big location-based social media messages from China's Sina Weibo network: Collection, storage, visualization, and potential ways of analysis

摘要

China's social media platform, Sina Weibo, like Twitter, hosts a considerable amount of big data: messages, comments, pictures. Collecting and analyzing information from this treasury of human behavior data is a challenge, although the message exchange on the network is readable by everyone through the web or app interface. The official Application Programming Interface (API) is the gateway to access and download public content from Sina Weibo and is used to collect messages for all mainland China. The nearby_timeline() request is used to harvest only messages with associated location information. This technical note serves as a reference for researchers who do not speak Mandarin but want to collect data from this rich source of information. Ways of data visualization are presented as a point cloud, density per areal unit, or clustered using Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). The relation of messages to census information is also given.