Abstract
Global cities act as influential hubs in the networked world. Their city brands, which are projected by the global news media, are becoming sustainable resources in various global competitions and cooperations. This study adopts the research paradigm of computational social science to assess and compare the city brand attention, positivity, and influence of ten Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) Alpha+ global cities, along with their dimensional structures, based on combining the cognitive and affective theoretical perspectives on the frameworks of the Anholt global city brand dimension system, the big data of global news knowledge graph in Google’s Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), and the technologies of word-embedding semantic mining and clustering analysis. The empirical results show that the overall values and dimensional structures of city brand influence of global cities form distinct levels and clusters, respectively. Although global cities share a common structural characteristic of city brand influence of the dimensions of presence and potential being most prominent, Western and Eastern global cities differentiate in the clustering of dimensional structures of city brand attention, positivity, and influence. City brand attention is more important than city brand positivity in improving the city brand influence of global cities. The preferences of the global news media over global city brands fits the nature of global cities.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the processes of globalization and urbanization have been greatly accelerated
We focused on assessing the global city brands constructed by the global news media
The study adopted the research paradigm of computational social science and conducted theory-driven, data-driven (Google GDELT global news knowledge graph), and technology-driven cross-disciplinary research in order to assess and compare the city brand attention, positivity, and influence, along with the dimensional structures of ten Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) Alpha+ global cities projected by the global news media
Summary
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the processes of globalization and urbanization have been greatly accelerated. City brands are becoming the sustainable resources of global cities in their continuous competition for attracting people, capital, and goods all over the world. Global news media plays a vital role in constructing the city brand image of global cities. Facilitated by the web and the mobile Internet, the vast volume of global news articles covering global cities diffuse over both the physical and cyberspace of the world, shaping the cognition and attitude of the global audience toward global city brands. Previous research lacks assessment and comparison of global city brands that are projected by the global news media, while the full-sample big data of the global news knowledge graph in Google’s Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) provides new opportunities to tackle this research question
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