In the waves of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, each U.S. state governor has been leading efforts to curb the spread of the virus within his or her state. Twitter has been widely used for crisis communications by governors. Their Twitter usage patterns can largely reflect how state governments responded to the COVID-19 crisis from both geographical and social network perspectives. Through spatial–temporal analysis, network analysis, and text mining, we identified several important usage patterns, such as (1) tweet quantities positively correlated with the pandemic severity; (2) most governors started to mention COVID-19 weeks before the first reported case in their states; (3) COVID-19-related hashtags were commonly used to organize information; (4) feedback was frequently provided by at-mentioning or retweeting other accounts; and (5) governors were networked for crisis communication, driven by demographics, pandemic severities, geographic closeness, cooperation, and party affiliations among states. The current usage patterns are generally consistent with the criteria for effective crisis communications on Twitter (listening, informing, feedback, and connections). Some actionable approaches for governors to improve Twitter crisis communications are also discussed. This exploratory study provides a guide for other agencies and officials to develop future crisis communication plans through leveraging social media for social good.

Twitter provides short messaging updates for fast dissemination along with retweeting and directed-following functionalities for user interaction, which makes it a popular tool for institutional outreach activities. This study analyzed U.S. geography departmental Twitter accounts and tweet histories through spatial–temporal analysis, frequency analysis, text mining, and network analysis. Although the tweeting frequencies; numbers of friends, followers, and mutual friends; and percentages of retweets and tweets with at-mentions or hashtags varied among departmental Twitter accounts, the account quantities, temporal tweeting patterns, and connection patterns among departments were generally reasonable. To improve outreach performance through Twitter, a geography department can (1) tweet more frequently; (2) actively discover, follow, and listen to its target audience consistently; (3) use at-mentions more frequently to interact with other accounts, especially professional organizations (e.g., the American Association of Geographers), geography departments, university programs, and active Twitter users; (4) tweet with suggested hashtags, including popular geographical research topics, popular events, organizations, and conference hashtags; (5) include community buzzwords when drafting tweets; (6) search, like, and retweet popular topics in the community; (7) follow and become mutual friends with more peer institutions; and (8) hire or designate a social media coordinator to implement these suggestions consistently and strategically. Key Words: data mining, geography departments, institutional Twitter usage, outreach, social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created complex problems that require organizations to collaborate within and across the sector line. Social media data can provide insights into how nonprofits interact for the pandemic response from both social network and geographical perspectives. This study innovatively investigated the connection and interaction patterns among 74 National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) nonprofits and three government agencies based on structural analyses and content analyses of their Twitter communications during the long-term global COVID-19 pandemic. The daily tweeting quantities of all nonprofits were generally consistent with the pandemic severity in the United States before July 2020 and remained stable afterward. Nonprofits’ tweets can reflect their purposes of sharing information, building communities, and taking actions for disaster response. Government agencies played leadership roles in providing COVID-19 guidelines and information. Human services, International and Foreign Affairs, and Public and Societal Benefit nonprofits, especially American Red Cross played central roles in the nonprofit communication network. Possible explanations include the following: (1) Geographically, connections and interactions among nonprofits are more likely to happen within the same city or in neighboring states. (2) Both mission homophily and heterophily contribute to connections and interactions among nonprofits, depending on their subsectors. The findings not only help the public better understand how nonprofits are collaboratively fighting the pandemic, but also provide guidance for nonprofits to plan for better interactions and communications in future disaster response.

Thousands of results of scientific publications on the topic of COVID-19 have emerged within a short time, raising significant challenges for scholars to organize the research, or even synthesize the knowledge in a timely or comprehensive manner. To facilitate this, we have developed a geospatial and semantic mapping platform to search and organize these large and unmapped digital collections. The semantic map visualizes research topics based on customized natural language processing algorithms, which helps users to identify their content of specific interest beyond keyword searches in web search engines. The resultant geospatial map extracts all the location names mentioned in the publications, illustrating where COVID-19 studies have been conducted and where neglected study areas might exist. The system has been deployed as a web service for public access.

A restless and dynamic intellectual landscape has taken hold in the field of spatial social network studies, given the increasingly attention towards fine-scale human dynamics in this urbanizing and mobile world. The measuring parameters of such dramatic growth of the literature include scientific outputs, domain categories, major journals, countries, institutions, and frequently used keywords. The research in the field has been characterized by fast development of relevant scholarly articles and growing collaboration among and across institutions. The Journal of Economic Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Urban Studies ranked first, second, and third, respectively, according to average citations. The United States, United Kingdom, and China were the countries that yielded the most published studies in the field. The number of international collaborative studies published in non-native English-speaking countries (such as France, Italy, and the Netherlands) were higher than native English-speaking countries. Wuhan University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University were the universities that published the most in the field. “Twitter”, “big data”, “networks”, “spatial analysis”, and “social capital” have been the major keywords over the past 20 years. At the same time, the keywords such as “social media”, “Twitter”, “big data”, “geography”, “China”, “human mobility”, “machine learning”, “GIS”, “location-based social networks”, “clustering”, “data mining”, and “location-based services” have attracted increasing attention in that same time frame, indicating the future research trends.