Abstract
In this chapter, we showcase the use of qualitative data available on two “geobrowsers” (i.e., Google Maps and Foursquare) and of a data-mining technique to quantify the sentiment of online reviews about parks. The underlying interest for this study comes from the growing literature suggesting that living near parks or other open spaces contributes to higher levels of physical activity and to lower levels of stress and fewer mental health problems. Mecklenburg County (North Carolina), which encompasses the City of Charlotte, is used as a case study. In a comparison among 97 cities in the USA, The Trust for Public Land ranks Charlotte’s park system at the very bottom and reports their spending per resident on their park system among the lowest 20% of these cities. Considering their lower spending, the city government may be particularly interested to leverage publicly available data from social media to complement the assessments they already perform about their park system, such as satisfaction surveys or quality assessments. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s low ranking – although unfortunate – indicates an opportunity for the city to improve its park system, which in turn could engage residents in more physical activity and, in doing so, create positive community health outcomes.
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Tagul provides a free and online tool to generate word clouds based on a text: tagul.com
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Dony, C.C., Fekete, E. (2020). Leveraging Social Media to Track Urban Park Quality for Improved Citizen Health. In: Lu, Y., Delmelle, E. (eds) Geospatial Technologies for Urban Health. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19573-1_9
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