Until very recently, it has been an arduous and costly work to collect and analyse data about large groups of individuals. The main drawback of the carefully planned paper-based polls and surveys had been their lack of cost efficiency and their inability to keep up with the timescales of the phenomena under investigation.

Nowadays, a vast amount of data collected about or generated by people is available digitally. The question is whether we can relate these digital traces of human activities – ranging from mobile phone calls to status updates on online social networks – to meaningful real-world outcomes. In my presentation, I would like to show a few possibilities of relating multiple geo-located digital traces to traditional census surveys or official land use data.

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