Abstract

With increasing growth of both social media and urbanization, studying urban life through the empirical lens of social media has led to some interesting research opportunities and questions. It is well-recognized that as a ‘social animal’, most humans are deeply embedded both in their cultural milieu and in broader society that extends well beyond close family, including neighborhoods, communities and workplaces. In this article, we study this embeddedness by leveraging urban dwellers’ social media footprint. Specifically, we define and empirically study the issue of spatio-textual affinity by collecting many millions of geotagged tweets collected from two diverse metropolises within the United States: the Boroughs of New York City, and the County of Los Angeles. Spatio-textual affinity is the intuitive hypothesis that tweets coming from similar locations (spatial affinity) will tend to be topically similar (textual affinity …

Date

2022

Authors

Minda Hu, Mayank Kejriwal

Journal

Journal of Computational Social Science

Volume

5

Issue

1

Pages

227-252

Publisher

Springer Nature Singapore