Workshop on “Geodata, (social) media data and linguistics”

On 26 February 2025, a workshop on “Geodata, (social) media data and linguistics” was held at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen. Colleagues from the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the DLR and from the Chair of English Linguistics as well as our Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC) of the University of Würzburg (JMU) presented the status quo of their work and discussed new research directions and opportunities for cooperation. Linking spatial data from remote sensing with other geo- and text data is proving to be a profitable way of describing and understanding processes in a better and more multidimensional way.

The cross-institutional research team has already carried out many joint projects within the framework of Geolingual Studies – https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/gls/ . An international workshop organized at the JMU in Würzburg in September 2023 formed one basis for the work. Here are the corresponding links:

https://remote-sensing.org/geolingual-studies-workshop-day-1/

https://remote-sensing.org/geolingual-studies-workshop-day-1-2/

https://remote-sensing.org/geolingual-studies-workshop-day-2-2/

https://remote-sensing.org/geolingual-studies-workshop-day-3/

Reference is made here to the several joint publications by now:

• The voices of the displaced: Mobility and Twitter conversations of migrants of Ukraine in 2022 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645732400030X  

• The Unseen—An Investigative Analysis of Thematic and Spatial Coverage of News on the Ongoing Refugee Crisis in West Africa https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/12/4/175

• The migrant perspective: Measuring migrants’ movements and interests using geolocated tweets https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/psp.2732

• Exploring the Geospatiality of Topics in different types of English Text Data https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13658816.2025.2460051

• Can Social Media Data Help to Understand the Socio-spatial Heterogeneity of the Interests and Concerns of Urban Citizens? A Twitter Data Assessment for Mexico City https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-61440-8_10

Beyond these initiatives, other research studies combining remote sensing and (social)media data have been published:

• Are the Poor Digitally Left Behind? Indications of Urban Divides Based on Remote Sensing and Twitter Data https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/7/8/304

• Digital deserts on the ground and from space https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7924562

• Geoinformation Harvesting From Social Media Data: A community remote sensing approach https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10049246

• Detecting crisis events from unstructured text data using signal words as crisis determinants https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17538947.2023.2278714

• Understanding an urbanizing planet: Strategic directions for remote sensing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425719301658