HUMAN INTERACTIONS IN PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SPACES: A GIS-BASED TIME-GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORATORY APPROACH

Information and communication technologies (ICT) such as cell phone and the Internet have extended opportunities of human activities and interactions from physical spaces to virtual spaces. The relaxed spatio-temporal constraints on individual activities may affect human activity-travel patterns, social networks, and many other aspects of society. A challenge for research of human activities in the ICT age is to develop analytical environments that can help visualize and explore individual activities in virtual spaces and their mutual impacts with physical activities.

This dissertation focuses on extending the time-geographic framework and developing a spatio-temporal exploratory environment in a space-time geographic information system (GIS) to facilitate research of human interactions in both physical and virtual spaces. In particular, this dissertation study addresses three research questions. First, it extends the time-geographic framework to assess the impacts of phone usage on potential face-to-face (F2F) meeting opportunities, as well as dynamic changes in potential F2F meeting opportunities over time. Secondly, this study extends the time-geographic framework to conceptualize and represent individual trajectories in an online social network space and to explore potential interaction opportunities among people in a virtual space. Thirdly, this study presents a spatio-temporal environment in a space-time GIS to facilitate exploration of the relationships between changes in physical proximity and changes in social closeness in a virtual space.

The major contributions of this dissertation include: (1) advancing the time-geographic framework in its ability of exploring processes of virtual communication alerting physical activity opportunities; (2) extending some concepts of the classical time geography from a physical space to a virtual space for representing and exploring virtual interaction patterns; (3) developing a space-time GIS that is useful for exploring patterns of individual activities and interactions in both physical and virtual spaces, as well as the interactions between these two spaces.