The social flow is a linear geographic feature that evidences an individual’s decision to connect places through travel, telecommunications and/or declaring personal relationships. These flows differ from traditional spatial networks (roads, etc.) because they are often non-planar, and provide evidence of personal intentionality to interact with the built environment and/or to perpetuate relationships with others.
We use tons of social flow data in today’s research, and so, we create new typologies, address new problems, and redefine social distance as the manifestation of social flows. We describe challenges for leveraging these data with commercial GISystems in terms of representing, visualizing, manipulating, statistically analyzing and ascribing meaning to social flows.
