CitySpeaks

How do cities speak about themselves on Twitter?

Group Presentation (.ppt): Temporary project link

Team Members

Marie Blønd - Tine Schjaerff Soerensen - Vimviriya Limkangvanmongkol - Juan-Carlos Goilo - Min ShengQian - Natalia Ishchenko - Liu Yang - Moritz Buechi - Benjamin Koeck - Ludmila Girardi - Agata Ludzis-Todorov - Marta Severo

Introduction

We were trying to identify how do cities speak on Twitter, using a dataset from DMI-TCAT, a huge extraction of 5 European Cities (Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Marseille, Bologna, Brussels) which are the part of project of the European Observation Network, Territorial Development and Cohesion (ESPON). The study was concerned about what are the topics associated with the city and where are the users speaking about the city locations.

Research Questions

How can you remote analyze what the city is speaking about from #cityname, locally and globally?

Who is speaking about and from the city? What is the city speaking about? What are the on-location local issues and how do they tie back to global movements/trends?

Methodology

The group was divided into 3 subgroups to analyse the cities of Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Marseille. 3 different methodological approaches (Top-down versus bottom up) to 3 different cities (datasets) #Amsterdam #Edinburgh #Marseille

Main criteria: - all subgroups works with the same date period: from 23 to 29 of June - all subgroups uses specific city Keyword data (all EU languages cities' mentions) + geotagged data (all tweets generated within cities' limits).

Searh topics that all groups considered: 1) Categories of hashtags (Tourism) 2) Network of places 3) Location // language //places 4) Specific hashtags

Findings

Go to each subgroups' wikis or see the .ppt file in the top of this page.

Conclusions

- Finding the conversations, issues and events, the geographical dimensions, user language and user specified locations may in some cases be used to distinguish between locals, tourists and geo-outsiders.

- Identifying local keywords and hashtags and applying it to a larger dataset can tell a story of how events and movements take place and develops on-location.

- Using #city by local or geolocated tweeters also ties into global movements that are enacted and translated on location as in the case of Scottish independence, Valreep squatting/eviction and dealing with city trash.

- To understand the local one must consider the global: comparing both is a way to re-scale the city.