The Geolocation of Web Logs from Textual Clues

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2009-08-29

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Clay Fink, Christine Piatko, James Mayfield, Danielle Chou, Tim Finin, and Justin Martineau, The Geolocation of Web Logs from Textual Clues, Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2009, DOI: 10.1109/CSE.2009.584

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© 2009 IEEE

Abstract

Understanding the spatial distribution of people who author social media content is of growing interest for researchers and commerce. Blogging platforms depend on authors reporting their own location. However, not all authors report or reveal their location on their blog’s home page. Automated geolocation strategies using IP address and domain name are not adequate for determining an author’s location because most blogs are not self-hosted. In this paper we describe a method that uses the place name mentions in a blog to determine an author’s location. We achieved an accuracy of 63% on a collection of 844 blogs with known locations.