Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities

103 Pages·2016·2.251 MB·English

by  Justin B. Hollander, Erin Graves, Henry Renski, Cara Foster-Karim, Andrew Wiley, Dibyendu Das (auth.)

URBAN SOCIAL
LISTENING
Potential and Pitfalls for
Using Microblogging Data
in Studying Cities
Justin B. Hollander, Erin Graves,
Henry Renski, Cara Foster-Karim,
Andrew Wiley and Dibyendu Das
Urban Social Listening

Justin   B.   H ollander • Erin   Graves • Henry   R enski
Cara   F oster-Karim • Andrew   Wiley • D ibyendu   D as
Urban Social
Listening
Potential and Pitfalls of Using Microblogging
Data in Studying Cities
Justin   B.   Hollander Cara   Foster-Karim
Tufts University Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts, USA Medford, Massachusetts, USA
Erin   Graves Andrew   Wiley
Urban Planner and Sociologist Tufts University
Cambridge, USA Medford, Massachusetts, USA
Henry   Renski Dibyendu   Das
University of Massachusetts Amherst Tufts University
Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Medford, Massachusetts, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-59490-7 ISBN 978-1-137-59491-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59491-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948422
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are very grateful to Tufts University’s Offi ce of the Vice Provost
through the Tufts Collaborates! Grant Program for initial support of
this research and to our colleagues on that book project, Profs. Tama
Leventhal and Natalya Zaika. More advanced stages of the research from
this book were supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (grant
UJH080714); special thanks go to Armando Carbonell. We appreciate the
generosity of IBM in providing us with a gratis one-year license of SPSS
Modeler; special thanks also go to Dr. Jeffrey Nichols at IBM for his early
help in downloading tweets.
Early versions of some of these chapters were presented at The Big
Data and Urban Informatics Workshop, University of Illinois (August
2014), and at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual
Conference in Philadelphia (October 2014). We are grateful for the valu-
able advice and suggestions offered by moderators and others at those
sessions. We also appreciate the early advice of Simcha Leventhal and
Donovan Guin to get this project going.
We also want to acknowledge the efforts of our many colleagues at
Tufts for helping to make this research happen, including Jackie Dejean,
Leigh Curley, Susan Morrison, Ann Urosevich, Maria Nicolau, and Mike
Flanary. Research assistance was provided by the following Tufts students:
Haleigh Williams, Owen Searls, Evan Sullivan, Ryan Bailey, and Suveer
Bahirwani.
Most of all, we want to express our deep appreciation for the love and
support our families have given us that has made this book possible: thank
you!
v

C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 A (Short) History of Social Media Sentiment Analysis 1 5
3 Taking Microblogging Data for a Test Drive 2 7
4 A Close Look at Urban Immigrant Communities 3 5
5 A National Comparison: Twitter versus the 
American Housing Survey 5 5
6 Conclusion 7 3
Appendices 8 3
Bibliography 9 1
Index 95
vii

L F
IST OF IGURES
Fig. 1.1 Models of personality, culture, and subjective well-being 7
Fig. 3.1 City of New Bedford, enveloped by a rectangle to facilitate
downloading of Twitter messages 29
Fig. 4.1 Fall River with latitude and longitude 4 0
Fig. 4.2 New Bedford with latitude and longitude 4 1
Fig. 5.1 Sample tweets from Atlanta 5 8
Fig. 5.2 Newark city boundaries and coordinates 5 8
ix