In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists’ emotions when visiting a city’s tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and activities like concerts, impact tourists’ emotions. In addition, our analysis suggests that tourists experience greater levels of enjoyment in places such as observatories rather than zoos. Finally, we find that local and international visitors tend to convey negative sentiment when visiting more than one attraction in a day whereas the opposite holds for out of state visitors.

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The common trend in the scientific inquiry of urban areas and their populations is to use real-world geographic and population data to understand, explain, and predict urban phenomena. We argue that this trend limits our understanding of urban areas as dealing with arbitrarily collected geographic data requires technical expertise to process; moreover, population data is often aggregated, sparsified, or anonymized for privacy reasons. We believe synthetic urban areas generated via procedural city generation, which is a technique mostly used in the gaming area, could help improve the state-of-the-art in many disciplines which study urban areas. In this paper, we describe a selection of research areas that could benefit from such synthetic urban data and show that the current research in procedurally generated cities needs to address specific issues (e.g., plausibility) to sufficiently capture real-world cities and thus take such data beyond gaming.