@article{Hecht_Stephens_2014, title={A Tale of Cities: Urban Biases in Volunteered Geographic Information}, volume={8}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14554}, DOI={10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14554}, abstractNote={ <p> <p class="AbstractText">Geotagged tweets, Foursquare check-ins and other forms of <em>volunteered geographic information</em> (VGI) play a critical role in numerous studies and a large range of intelligent technologies. We show that three of the most commonly used sources of VGI – Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare – are biased towards urban perspectives at the expense of rural ones. Utilizing a geostatistics-based approach, we demonstrate that, on a <em>per capita basis</em>, these important VGI datasets have more users, more information, and higher quality information within metropolitan areas than outside of them. VGI is a subset of user-generated content (UGC) and we discuss how our results suggest that urban biases might exist in non-geographically referenced UGC as well. Finally, because Foursquare is exclusively made up of VGI, we argue that Foursquare (and possibly other location-based social networks) has fundamentally failed to appeal to rural populations.</p> </p> }, number={1}, journal={Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media}, author={Hecht, Brent and Stephens, Monica}, year={2014}, month={May}, pages={197-205} }