Diversity in Urban Social Media Analytics

Jie Yang, Claudia Hauff, Geert-Jan Houben, Christiaan Titos Bolivar

Abstract: Social media has emerged as one of the data backbones of urban analytics systems. Thanks to geo-located microposts (text-, image-, and video-based) created and shared through portals such as Twitter and Instagram, scientists and practitioners can capitalise on the availability of real-time and semantically rich data sources to perform studies related to cities and the people inhabiting them. Urban analytics systems usually consider the micro posts originating from within a city’s boundary uniformly, without consideration for the demographic (e.g. gender, age), geographic, technological or contextual (e.g. role in the city) differences among a platform’s users. It is well-known though, that the usage and adoption of social media profoundly differ across user segments, cities, as well as countries. We thus advocate for a better understanding of the intrinsic diversity of social media users and contents.