Social Stratification and Geo-Media: An Empirical Analysis

In the digital revolution era, new data and new sources allow researchers to find new approaches to study society and its dynamics (Lupton, 2015). Among these types of data, social media data open up new frontiers and different ways of producing social knowledge based on massive and easily accessible information to be used for studying social dynamics and user behavior patterns (Rogers, 2015). Additionally, the increasing availability of data with geographic information put the spatial dimension – initially ignored in social media analysis – at the center of interest in digital and web studies (Goodchild, 2007; Campagna et al., 2016). The geo-located data can be an interesting way to bridge the digital contents with socio-economic and demographic context enriching the research process and the comprehension of social phenomena (Chappell, 2017). Starting from these considerations our work aims to illustrate the potentialities of different methods for the analysis of geodata by integrating the study of socio-spatial stratification with social media analysis and therefore combining the virtual and geographical space through the use of both online and offline data sources. The results show the potential of these analysis approaches in setting out different tools to explore and study socio-spatial stratification in social research