Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City

Mikael Brunila, Jack LaViolette, Sky CH-Wang, Priyanka Verma, Clara Féré, Grant McKenzie

Abstract:

Critical toponymy examines the dynamics of
power, capital, and resistance through place
names and the sites to which they refer. Studies
here have traditionally focused on the semantic
content of toponyms and the top-down institutional processes that produce them. However,
they have generally ignored the ways in which
toponyms are used by ordinary people in everyday discourse, as well as the other strategies of geospatial description that accompany
and contextualize toponymic reference. Here,
we develop computational methods to measure
how cultural and economic capital shape the
ways in which people refer to places, through
a novel annotated dataset of 47,440 New York
City Airbnb listings from the 2010s. Building
on this dataset, we introduce a new named entity recognition (NER) model able to identify
important discourse categories integral to the
characterization of place. Our findings point toward new directions for critical toponymy and
to a range of previously understudied linguistic
signals relevant to research on neighborhood
status, housing and tourism markets, and gentrification.