Abstract
BackgroundIn this study, we clustered a large number of microblog users into city nodes based on the interpersonal relations and geographic location attributes of these users and clustered the user relations within each city into the relations among cities in the Wuhan “1+8” City Circle (WCC) to transform and map the interpersonal network in the virtual network environment to an intercity network.MethodsBased on this mapping, we analysed the characteristics proposed two evaluation indicators—degree of city cohesion and degree of city outreach—to quantify the relations within a city and the relations among different cities. The WCC urban network was analysed from a social network perspective, and the differences and similarities in a city’s status between the virtual network and the real world were explored.ResultsAs the “1” in the “1 + 8” WCC, Wuhan’s decisive dominance in WCC was discussed from multiple perspectives to show the centre point of the circle and the monopoly status of Wuhan in WCC. This finding is consistent with the status of Wuhan in the actual geographic space as the political, economic and cultural centre of Hubei Province. Our study indicated tiny communication among the other 8 cities along the periphery of WCC in the virtual microblogging network space, with the exception of Wuhan; they closely resembled eight independent individuals.ConclusionsThe characteristics of the WCC intercity information exchange indicated that the concept of WCC did not stand out in the virtual microblogging network space and that these cities frequently exchanged information with cities outside WCC. And in WCC the degree of cohesion and outreach in a city node were significantly positively correlated with the economic development level of the city.
Highlights
In this study, we clustered a large number of microblog users into city nodes based on the interpersonal relations and geographic location attributes of these users and clustered the user relations within each city into the relations among cities in the Wuhan “1+8” City Circle (WCC) to transform and map the interpersonal network in the virtual network environment to an intercity network
Wuhan 1+8 City Circle (WCC) was employed as an example; its urban network characteristics were analysed from the perspective of a virtual social network to explore the similarities and differences in a city’s position between the virtual network space and reality
Microblog user relations in a virtual world comprise purely interpersonal networks; the relations in this network may consist of either “strong ties” or “weak ties” (Granovetter, [35])
Summary
According to the data released by the Sina Microblog (Weibo) Data Centre, as of Dec. 2016 (Sina, [31]), SM had 297 million active microblog users, almost a quarter of China population. The conditions for user screening are as follows: 1) the user is located in WCC; 2) the user sample contains both “grassroots” and “celebrities” to reflect the real-world network environment, and “zombie fans” are excluded according to the definition: invalid accounts signed up by network companies for the purpose of increasing the number of fans for certain users, especially celebrity ones, and getting them more attention (Yuan et al, [39]); and 3) the number of user samples for each selected city is proportional to the total number of microblog users of that city to reflect the actual urban community network environment of the entire city circle According to these requirements, we employed the SM open platform application programing interface (API) and traditional web parsing technologies (Lian et al, [40]; Zhou et al, [41]) to develop a web crawler program to collect data. The degree of city cohesion reflects the characteristics of mutual following and is calculated as follows: Ni 1⁄4
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