Evaluating Cultural Impact in Discursive Space through Digital Footprints

Jesús López Baeza, Jens Bley, Kay Hartkopf, Martin Niggemann, James Arias and Anais Wiedenhöfer
Additional contact information
Jesús López Baeza: Digital City Science, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
Jens Bley: ANN RADAR, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
Kay Hartkopf: ANN RADAR, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
Martin Niggemann: CityScienceLab, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
James Arias: CityScienceLab, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
Anais Wiedenhöfer: Urban Design, HafenCity Universität, 20457 Hamburg, Germany

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 7, 1-14

Abstract: The research presented in this paper describes an evaluation of the impact of spatial interventions in public spaces, measured by social media data. This contribution aims at observing the way a spatial intervention in an urban location can affect what people talk about on social media. The test site for our research is Domplatz in the center of Hamburg, Germany. In recent years, several actions have taken place there, intending to attract social activity and spotlight the square as a landmark of cultural discourse in the city of Hamburg. To evaluate the impact of this strategy, textual data from the social networks Twitter and Instagram (i.e., tweets and image captions) are collected and analyzed using Natural Language Processing intelligence. These analyses identify and track the cultural topic or “people talking about culture” in the city of Hamburg. We observe the evolution of the cultural topic, and its potential correspondence in levels of activity, with certain intervention actions carried out in Domplatz. Two analytic methods of topic clustering and tracking are tested. The results show a successful topic identification and tracking with both methods, the second one being more accurate. This means that it is possible to isolate and observe the evolution of the city’s cultural discourse using NLP. However, it is shown that the effects of spatial interventions in our small test square have a limited local scale, rather than a city-wide relevance.

Keywords: smart culture; smart city; digital culture; NLP; Twitter; social media; social networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/7/4043/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/7/4043/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:7:p:4043-:d:530550

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().