The migrant perspective: Measuring migrants' movements and interests using geolocated tweets

Geolocated social media data hold a hitherto untapped potential for exploring the relationship between user mobility and their interests at a large scale. Using geolocated Twitter data from Nigeria, we provide a feasibility study that demonstrates how the linkage of (1) a trajectory analysis of Twitter users' geolocation and (2) natural language processing of Twitter users' text content can reveal information about the interests of migrants. After identifying migrants via a trajectory analysis, we train a language model to automatically detect the topics of the migrants' tweets. Biases of manual labelling are circumvented by learning community‐defined topics from a Nigerian web forum. Results suggest that differences in users' mobility correlate with varying interests in several topics, most notably religion. We find that Twitter data can be a flexible source for exploring the link between users' mobility and interests in large‐scale analyses of urban populations. The joint use of spatial techniques and text analysis enables migration researchers to (a) study migrant perspectives in greater detail than is possible with census data and (b) at a larger scale than is feasible with interviews. Thereby, it provides a valuable complement to interviews, surveys and censuses, and holds a large potential for further research

Enhancing Earth Observation of Migration with Insights from Social Media

Complex migration processes are pervasive on the African continent and are intrinsically linked to ongoing demographic, social, economic, and ecological changes. To better understand the complexity of these processes, there is a need for more and better data and knowledge on the flows, the drivers, and the effects of migration. Earth Observation is increasingly able to accurately map drivers and effects of migration which have a visible impact on the earth’s surface. Such drivers are e.g. floods, droughts, and effects are e.g. urban expansion or refugee camps (top image: Sentinel-2 based maps of the migration induced urban growth in Abuja and Maiduguri, which takes the form of low-dense urban development and refugee camps). However, underlying socio-economic and political drivers as well as individuals‘ subjective decisions or perceptions of situations and the environment can not be directly mapped using Earth Observation sensors. In this project we aim to reduce these knowledge gaps by additional data sources. In this context, geolocated social media data can provide valuable insights into migrants’ movements and motivations

Concord patterns in South Pacific Englishes - the influence of New Zealand English and the local substrate

The outer circle varieties of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Island show similarities as well as differences, among other things due to the Melanesian and Polynesian substrate influence. Another possible source for the unity and diversity of the South Pacific Englishes is the fact that - due to geographical, political and economic reasons - New Zealand English and Australian English may in some of the islands supersede the former prestigious American and British varieties as a model for the national standard. To discuss the unity and diversity of the new Englishes in the South Pacific, the focus of this paper will be on aspects of subject-verb agreement. In Fiji English the verb is often used in singular even if the subject is plural (Mugler & Tent 2004: 782). This may also be of some relevance for the usage of collective nouns, where normally both singular and plural concord marking on verbs is available. The paper will discuss whether preference of singular verb with plural subject or a particular usage of collective nouns is a common trait of all three varieties in question and whetherthe local substrate languages and/or New Zealand English as a model for the national standard have some influence. Data will be provided by a corpus of newspaper articles downloaded from the internet from newspapers representing the three different outer circle varieties. For Fiji English the press section of the ICE-Fiji will also be included. The paper discusses the results as a step towards a general description of the 'South Pacific Englishes' and also considers the suitability of the WWW as a source for such a case-study