Metropolises in the Twittersphere: An Informetric Investigation of Informational Flows and Networks
Department of Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
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The author contributed equally to this work.
Academic Editors: Jochen Schiewe and Wolfgang Kainz
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4(4), 1894-1912; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4041894
Received: 30 June 2015
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Revised: 27 August 2015
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Accepted: 11 September 2015
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Published: 25 September 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geo-Information Fostering Innovative Solutions for Smart Cities)
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.
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Keywords:
social media; microblogging; Twitter; informational city; big data; network analysis
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Förster, T.; Mainka, A. Metropolises in the Twittersphere: An Informetric Investigation of Informational Flows and Networks. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4, 1894-1912. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4041894
AMA Style
Förster T, Mainka A. Metropolises in the Twittersphere: An Informetric Investigation of Informational Flows and Networks. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 2015; 4(4):1894-1912. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4041894
Chicago/Turabian StyleFörster, Thorsten, and Agnes Mainka. 2015. "Metropolises in the Twittersphere: An Informetric Investigation of Informational Flows and Networks" ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 4, no. 4: 1894-1912. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4041894
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