City Connectedness Through Twitter
Researchers from Harvard and Northeastern University have used Twitter, a popular social media platform, to measure social connectedness in the United States’ 50 largest cities. In the very first lecture of Networks, we talked about something called an ego network. This ego network was introduced to us as a graph of connections from one person to everyone they know and the relationships between those people as well. Similar to this graph we were also shown an example of a social network in the form of a Karate club that shows the friendships between a group of people. Much like the very first lecture of Networks, these researchers have used social media as a network to collect data on how connected humans are within a city. The difference with this study, however, is that they are not tracking relationships between people but rather the relationships between a person and their locations and how those relationships correspond to other peoples’ relationships.
Using “more than 130 million geotagged tweets, sent by more than 375,000 people,” (Florida) the research team created two distinct variables to measure connectedness. They selected a primary variable called the “equitable mobility index” or EMI and a secondary variable called the “concentrated mobility index” or CMI. The EMI is described as gauging “the degree to which people move between neighborhoods in roughly similar proportions,” meaning how evenly travel is spread out throughout the city. CMI, on the other hand, is described as gauging “the extent to which visits are concentrated in a handful of places,” or in other words gauging how concentrated visits are to a fewer amount of locations. The researchers found that the size of the city is the largest factor in deciding how connected it is “accounting for roughly half the explanatory power of the researchers’ models.” Size, however, is inverse to the connectedness of a city, as the city size increases, the connectedness decreases. Florida writes on to say that other factors contributed such as higher education raising connectedness while segregation, unsurprisingly, lowered it. What they found especially interesting, though, was that public transit contributed very little to social connectedness. Perhaps the findings of this study could be used to help better design future cities or even help restructure current ones to increase social connectedness and bring us even closer together as a nation.
Florida, Richard. “How Socially Integrated Is Your City? Ask Twitter.” CityLab. 18 September 2019. www.citylab.com/life/2019/09/social-network-urban-travel-city-neighborhood-twitter-data/598123/. Accessed 23 September 2019