A Study of Public Attitudes toward Shanghai’s Image under the Influence of COVID-19: Evidence from Comments on Sina Weibo

Yanlong Guo (), Lan Zu, Denghang Chen () and Han Zhang
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Yanlong Guo: Social Innovation Design Research Centre, Anhui University, Hefei 203106, China
Lan Zu: Social Innovation Design Research Centre, Anhui University, Hefei 203106, China
Denghang Chen: Department of Science and Technology Communication, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 203106, China
Han Zhang: College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266000, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 3, 1-27

Abstract: With the advent of the Internet era, Chinese users tend to choose to express their opinions on social media platforms represented by Sina Weibo. The changes in people’s emotions toward cities from the microblogging texts can reflect the image of cities presented on mainstream social media, and thus target a good image of cities. In this paper, we collected microblog data containing “Shanghai” from 1 January 2019 to 1 September 2022 by Python technology, and we used three methods: Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency keyword statistics, Latent Dirichlet Allocation theme model construction, and sentiment analysis by Zhiwang Sentiment Dictionary. We also explore the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on Shanghai’s urban image in the context of the “Shanghai Territorial Static Management”, an important public opinion topic during the COVID-19 epidemic. The results of the study show that the “Shanghai-wide static management” of COVID-19 epidemic has significantly reduced the public’s perception of Shanghai and negatively affected the city’s image. By analyzing the data results, we summarize the basic characteristics of Shanghai’s city image and provide strategies for communicating Shanghai’s city image in the post-epidemic era.

Keywords: city image; COVID-19 epidemic; social media; LDA; sentiment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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