Research on automatically geolocating social media users has conventionally
been based on the text content of posts from a given user or the social network
of the user, with very little crossover between the two, and no bench-marking
of the two approaches over compara- ble datasets. We bring the two threads of
research together in first proposing a text-based method based on adaptive
grids, followed by a hybrid network- and text-based method. Evaluating over
three Twitter datasets, we show that the empirical difference between text- and
network-based methods is not great, and that hybridisation of the two is
superior to the component methods, especially in contexts where the user graph
is not well connected. We achieve state-of-the-art results on all three
datasets