BigData 2015 - Special Issue on "Integrating Big Social Data, Computing, and Modeling for a Synthesized Spatial Social Science"

Cartography and Geographic Information Science Special Issue on
"Integrating Big Social Data, Computing, and Modeling for a Synthesized Spatial Social Science"
The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic shift towards analyzing ever-increasing amounts of large-scale diverse data. Effective solutions can be possibly developed in an interdisciplinary, collaborative and timely manner with the introduction of new data, methods and computing platform. To promote the transformative computational paradigm in social sciences, many scholars use computational models to simulate the actions and interactions among individuals. Rigorous analysis of emerging socioeconomic events opens up a rich empirical context for the social sciences research and policy interventions. Such highly topical subjects, however, increase the difficulty to derive effective, validated, and convincible information through intellectual inquiry and survey. The emerging platforms such as social media networks become a new important data source to understand complex human and socioeconomic systems. Computational platforms integrating the latest distributed computing models, such as cloud computing and graphic processing unit (GPU) computing, together with the advanced data mining techniques become critical to investigate the impact of and response to policies and events in a timely fashion.
In the case of measuring economic policy impact, for instance, it is important to understand the time lag between policy implementation and the actual impact on the economy or behaviors of the agents. Great challenges remain to efficiently archive, retrieve and mine the massive user-generated unstructured datasets before meaningful and interesting research questions can be raised and answered.
Hence, this special issue aims to shed light on the opportunities, challenges and solutions of integrating the big social data and latest computing, modeling and information techniques for a synthesized spatial social science. The accepted papers will provide new insights into the theoretical framework and methodology for understanding the space-time patterns produced by the new data source from the synthesis perspective.
Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):
1. Online communities and online behaviors as data sources.
2. Evaluation, accreditation, verification & validation of computational social science models integrating social media data.
3. New computational models to support social applications, such as public health, disaster resilience, etc.
4. New algorithms for big social data mining and analysis.
5. Distributed computing (e.g., cloud computing), spatial database, and software framework for large-scale social data storing, indexing, processing, retrieving, analyzing, and visualizing.
6. Agent-based social simulation models.
Important Dates
10 July 2014, 800-word abstract submission to guest editors
1 August 2014, full paper submission invited
1 March 2015, full paper submission online
1 June 2015, revision/rejection notification
1 November 2015, paper acceptance notification
Submission Guidelines
This Cartography and Geographic Information Science special issue will include eight full papers. Manuscripts of about 7,000 words should be submitted by March 1, 2015. Each full paper will receive comments from at least three reviewers.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science is abstracted and indexed in EBSCOhost; Elsevier BV; Compendex; GEOBASE; Scopue; Gale; National Library of Medicine; PubMed; OCLC; Ovid; ProQuest; The Engineering Index Monthly; Thomson Reuters; Social Sciences Citation Index; and the Web of Science. More information including submission style can be found under http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tcag20/current.
Guest editors:
Xinyue Ye, Computational Social Science Lab & Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, xye5-AT-kent.edu
Qunying Huang, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, qhuang46-AT-wisc.edu
Wenwen Li, GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation & School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, wenwen-AT-asu.edu