The Big Apple versus The Big Orange.
The City of Dreams versus The City of Angels.
To do so, we analyzedmillions of GPS-enabled tweetsacross New York City and LA.
It could be valuable for understanding many aspects of urban life, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Tweeting in Los Angeles (left) and New York City (right).
Blue indicates density of tweets; the brighter the blue the greater the number of tweets.
Minda Hu, CC BY-ND
Its more difficult to determine whether two tweets are talking about similar things.
To overcome this problem, we used state-of-the-artnatural language processingtechnology.
We used this technology to group tweets into clusters of topics.
We also found that New Yorkers referred to themselves and their city far more often than Angelenos did.
In contrast, traditional social science tends to rely onsurveys and pollsto quantify public perception about an issue.
For example, Gallup releases new survey data every few months and currentlycharges US$30,000 for academic licenses.
Decades ago, researchers found thatmonetary incentives increase response rates significantly.
Even today, online surveys are often accompanied by lottery-based promises of receiving an Amazon gift card.
Researchers are working oncombining the benefits of traditional and computational social science.
Zooming into our data, we uncovered some fascinating trends that we hope future research will explore.
Why do high-crime areas tweet more?
We dont know yet, but the trend is consistent across both New York City and LA.
Eventually, we hope to use our methods with a large set of international metropolises to study urban behavior.
