Comparing Measures of Linguistic Diversity Across Social Media Language
  Data and Census Data at Subnational Geographic Areas
Sidney G. -J. Wong Jonathan Dunn Benjamin Adams
This paper describes a preliminary study on the comparative linguistic
ecology of online spaces (i.e., social media language data) and real-world
spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand (i.e., subnational administrative areas). We
compare measures of linguistic diversity between these different spaces and
discuss how social media users align with real-world populations. The results
from the current study suggests that there is potential to use online social
media language data to observe spatial and temporal changes in linguistic
diversity at subnational geographic areas; however, further work is required to
understand how well social media represents real-world behaviour.