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Publication

Luchtbal through the Lens of Twitter

Book Contribution - Chapter

A recurring challenge in urban studies is the task of understanding space. In most cases, the objective is to identify the way space is used and characterise the people who use it. This is typically achieved through direct observation or interventions like interviews. Even though these methods form the mainstay of most urban studies research, they face limitations such as high running cost and unsupportive locals. Alternative methods such as the gatecount and static snapshots can provide large amounts of data but lack a semantic dimension offered by location based (LB) social network data. Twitter, an online social network for text based messaging, is a large scale datasource that contains LB data that relates people to activities in urban spaces.Twitter users are part of a social network where they can tell others what they think, how they feel and what they are doing. While the subject varies, messages typically express opinions and feelings that describe the people, places and events around them. For that purpose, urban studies can benefit from studying LB Twitter data in order to overcome such limitations. We present a study that describes Luchtbal through digital traces left behind in LB Twitter data. We combine spatial, temporal and textual data with identities from Twitter to learn about the people and activities in
Book: Scenes from Luchtbal. Whatever happens to the modernist city?
Pages: 54 - 57
ISBN:9491789015
Publication year:2013