Abstract
Information flows on social media platforms are able to show trends and user interests as well as connections between users. In this paper, we present a method how to analyze city related networks on the social media platform Twitter based on the user content. Forty million tweets have been downloaded via Twitter’s REST API (application programming interface) and Twitter’s Streaming API. The investigation focuses on two aspects: firstly, trend detection has been done to analyze 31 informational world cities, according the user activity, popularity of shared websites and topics defined by hashtags. Secondly, a hint of how connected informational cities are to each other is given by creating a clustered network based on the number of connections between different city pairs. Tokyo, New York City, London and Paris clearly lead the ranking of the most active cities if compared by the total number of tweets. The investigation shows that Twitter is very frequently used to share content from other services like Instagram or YouTube. The most popular topics in tweets reveal great differences between the cities. In conclusion, the investigation shows that social media services like Twitter also can be a mirror of the society they are used in and bring to light information flows of connected cities in a global network. The presented method can be applied in further research to analyze information flows regarding specific topics and/or geographical locations.
Highlights
Social media has become a major issue in today’s society
We will adapt the idea of this study in regard to an informetric investigation of microblogging connectivity of 31 informational world cities on Twitter
The extraction of the top links shared in tweets related to informational world cities have bring into light that other social media services lead the ranking in almost every city
Summary
Social media has become a major issue in today’s society. It changed everyday life for many people as well as the internet itself. We will adapt the idea of this study in regard to an informetric investigation of microblogging connectivity of 31 informational world cities on Twitter. Twittersphere includes all postings (i.e., tweets) made on Twitter and just refers to users of this microblog These are the limitations of this analysis. Mainka et al [30] did a similar study for the 31 informational world cities They come to the conclusion that Twitter is the most actively used social media platform for goverment and library use. To our knowledge, it is one of the first attempts to measure information flows between cities using the microblog Twitter with an informetric approach
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