Urbanscope: A Lens to Observe Language Mix in Cities

Abstract

Cities of the 21st century are places where various actors interact, where physical systems, that are sometime geographically distant, are strictly dependent, where relational mechanisms become crucial, and where the boundaries between individual and collective, local and global, real and digital become more and more blurred. In this context, social media can be used as a digital lens to analyze the space and the territory of cities. In fact, they offer a great opportunity to individualize and understand the connections that might exist between different spheres. In this article, we use Twitter to analyze the language mix of the city and to detect language communities within the city neighborhoods. We then compare these “digital” communities, discovered through Twitter, with the “real” communities identified by the traditional census data. Milan, a city which is increasingly becoming an international melting pot, is chosen as a case study for this work.

Reading the city through its neighbourhoods: Deep text embeddings of Yelp reviews as a basis for determining similarity and change

“…Contemporary big data has the potential to identify linguistic patterns in the city in a more systematic fashion, even if this possibility has not yet been fully realized. Twitter data for example has been used in many geographical analyses [26,27], for instance, to explore the degree of geographic concentration of virtual social networks [28], to predict intrinsic population characteristics (including the geographical location of the authors) from food-related tweets [29], and to map linguistic communities in a cosmopolitan city like Milan [30] and "city communities" through machine learning techniques in Bogotá [31]. In a recent study, researchers used geo-located tweets to measure the social integration of U.S. cities based on the everyday travels of people across neighbourhoods [15].…”

Models and Practices in Urban Data Science at Scale

“…In fact, cities are increasingly attracting new people, with half of the world's inhabitants living in urban areas [2]. Furthermore, cities are not only physical centers but also virtual hubs, where individuals and communities interact and exchange messages through social media [3]. As a consequence of this dense network of interactions, a great amount of data, the so called Big Data [4], can be tracked.…”

“…In this experiment [3], we build an analysis to understand multilingualism in the city. We focused on Milano again, and we used Twitter to analyse the language mix of the city and to capture language communities within the city neighbourhoods.…”

The time varying network of urban space uses in Milan

“…The social relevance of NILs have been once again confirmed since one of the five objectives of 2019 PGT is to enhance them through the regeneration of their public spaces, as a first step towards a new polycentric city model. Given their importance in Milan urban planning, we adopted NILs as units in the analysis we performed, as also done in other studies on this city (Arnaboldi et al 2017;Mariotti et al 2017Mariotti et al , 2018.…”