Follow the Geographic Information: The Challenges of Spatial Analysis in Digital Methods

In the digital environment, defined as a space with no anchors (Menduni 2014), the spatial dimension may have a significant role, mostly in relation to the Internet or digital studies. Social Media Geographic Information (Campagna et al. 2016), even if limited, can be highly useful to overcome some limitations of social media analysis and user generated content. With the objective to report the potential and limits of this approach, in this article a case study will be presented on the individual perception related to COVID-19 in Italy. Starting from the analysis of ecological data and the social media data, we reproduce three measures by exploring three different elements that could be anchored to a geographical dimension: the storytelling of COVID (COVID-Issues), the spread of infection (COVID-Spread), and the distribution of measures (COVID-Measures) to understand the regional trends of the second wave of the pandemic emergence that represent the timespan of this contribution. Keywords: geo-social media, twitter, ecological analysis, case study, API