Geovisualize your social media data
If you have NVivo 10 for Windows Service Pack 2 (or later), you can display a map to geovisualize a dataset containing social media content—for example, from Facebook or Twitter.
In this topic
- Display a map to geovisualize your social media data
- Interact with a map of social media data
- View social media commentary from users in a particular location
- How reliable is the location data on the map?
- Working with data captured before the Service Pack 2 release
Display a map to geovisualize your social media data
You can click the Map tab on a dataset containing social media content to geovisualize the data. The map contains pins that represent the location of the users. The location is based on information from the user's profile—not on the location at the time of making the post, comment or Tweet.
The number on a pin represents the number of posts, comments, or Tweets from each unique location.
The map can provide a deeper understanding of the data and help you to answer questions like:
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Does my dataset represent views from a global area or from a smaller region?
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What did people from a particular region have to say?
You need an internet connection to display and interact with the map.
Interact with a map of social media data
You can interact with the map to see the data from different perspectives.
To see the name of a location, use your mouse to hover over a pin.
To move around on the map, do one of the following:
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Click and drag with your mouse to pan to a new location.
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Use the arrow keys.
To change the level of detail in the map, do one of the following:
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Use the Zoom slider on the Status bar.
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Press CTRL+PLUS or CTRL+MINUS.
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Use the scroll wheel on the mouse.
View social media commentary from users in a particular location
If you want to see social media commentary from a single location—double click on a pin. The data relating to the location is displayed as a node preview.
To see social media commentary from a wider area—for example, all of the pins in a state or country:
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Hold down the CTRL key as you select multiple pins.
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Hold down the CTRL key, right-click, and then click Open Node Preview.
How reliable is the location data on the map?
Each unique location in the dataset is represented by a pin in the map. The location is based on information from the user’s profile. Some social media sites allow users to enter any text as their profile location. If a user’s profile contains ambiguous or frivolous information, the location shown on the map may not be accurate.
Working with data captured before the Service Pack 2 release
Social media data captured before the release of Service Pack 2 does not contain location coordinates, so this data will not be represented on the map. It is important to keep your NVivo and NCapture software up-to-date—if you capture new social media data and there are no pins on the map, make sure that you have the latest version of NCapture.