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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

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Urban and Regional Planning and Development

Abstract

Most studies on Black Friday have largely relied on survey or sales data from case studies of specific cities, which are lack of spatial-temporal granularity. The recent development of location-aware technologies has enabled what Goodchild described as “humans as sensors”, and as a result there has been a large volume of volunteered geographic information with explicitly spatial and temporal tags. Mining these rapidly growing and timely data in the context of space-time synthesis provides a new perspective for understanding the pulse of shopping behavior. In this chapter, we analyze Black Friday patterns and trends in the USA using a dataset retrieved from Twitter. A spatial-temporal analysis of tweeting patterns is conducted. This study tries to discern patterns of tweets on Black Friday in a comparative context.

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Acknowledgements

This material is partially based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1416509. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Informatics & Spatial Computing Lab, Department of Informatics, Ying Wu College of Computing, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Xinyue Ye

  2. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Bing She

  3. GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation & School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

    Wenwen Li

  4. School of Information, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

    Sonali Kudva

  5. Computational Social Science Lab & Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

    Samuel Benya

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  1. Xinyue Ye
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  2. Bing She
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  3. Wenwen Li
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  4. Sonali Kudva
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  5. Samuel Benya
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xinyue Ye .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA

    Rajiv R. Thakur

  2. Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA

    Ashok K. Dutt

  3. Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA

    Sudhir K. Thakur

  4. Department of Geography-Earth Science, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA

    George M. Pomeroy

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Ye, X., She, B., Li, W., Kudva, S., Benya, S. (2020). What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?. In: Thakur, R., Dutt, A., Thakur, S., Pomeroy, G. (eds) Urban and Regional Planning and Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_11

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