Abstract
Place can be generally defined as a location that has been assigned meaning through human experience, and as such it is of multidisciplinary scientific interest. Up to this point place has been studied primarily within the context of social sciences as a theoretical construct. The availability of large amounts of user-generated content, e.g. in the form of social media feeds or Wikipedia contributions, allows us for the first time to computationally analyze and quantify the shared meaning of place. By aggregating references to human activities within urban spaces we can observe the emergence of unique themes that characterize different locations, thus identifying places through their discernible sociocultural signatures. In this paper we present results from a novel quantitative approach to derive such sociocultural signatures from Twitter contributions and also from corresponding Wikipedia entries. By contrasting the two we show how particular thematic characteristics of places (referred to herein as platial themes) are emerging from such crowd-contributed content, allowing us to observe the meaning that the general public, either individually or collectively, is assigning to specific locations. Our approach leverages probabilistic topic modelling, semantic association, and spatial clustering to find locations are conveying a collective sense of place. Deriving and quantifying such meaning allows us to observe how people transform a location to a place and shape its characteristics.
Highlights
The study of space and place has been the subject of multiple disciplines, ranging from geography [1,2] and planning [3,4], to health informatics [5], sociology [6,7], and psychology [8,9,10], to name but a few
In this Fig we show the spatial distribution in finer resolution in order to better communicate the level of alignment between Twitter clusters and corresponding physical places: green clusters align at, or near, known areas of recreational affordances such as parks and squares, with the most notable cluster spatially aligned with Central Park
We often encounter the term read in tweets originating in the vicinity of airports, leading to the detection of local educational hotspots, even though in that case it is used by passengers who read books or periodicals while awaiting their plane
Summary
The study of space and place has been the subject of multiple disciplines, ranging from geography [1,2] and planning [3,4], to health informatics [5], sociology [6,7], and psychology [8,9,10], to name but a few. The concept of place itself remains rather elusive, as it is the outcome of cognitive processes that were up to now difficult to observe and curate. An oftencited definition has been provided by Tuan [2] who termed places as “. . .spatial locations that have been given meaning by human experience.”. In the context of this paper, we consider place to be one’s perception of a location as it relates to one’s sociocultural views and personal. Places are formed through the reoccurrence of experiences and activities (of individuals or groups) at a certain location [11,12], which transform this location from a geometric concept (its three dimensional shape) to an experiential construct (conveying personal and/or public perceptions). We refer to the defining characteristics of places, whether they are e.g. a financial district, a nightlife hotspot, or an artistic neighbourhood of a city, as platial signatures
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