GIScience Considerations in Spatial Social Networks

There has been a proliferation of literature that incorporates social network analysis (SNA) to study geographic phenomena. We argue that these incorporations have mostly been superficial. What is needed is a stronger interrogation of the challenges and possibilities of a tight coupling of spatial and social network concepts, which take advantage of the strengths of each methodology. In this paper, we create a typology of existing research focused on the integration of geography into SNA: nodal, topographic and spatial. We then describe three core concepts that co-exist in the two fields but are not necessarily complementary: distance, communities, and scale. We consider how they can be appropriated and how they can be more tightly coupled into spatial social networks. We argue that the only way we can move beyond a superficial integration is to holistically identify the challenges and consider new methods to address the complexities of integration.