Abstract
This research extends city image research to the communication space afforded by the World Wide Web through the efficient use of web-based information and the analysis of the thematic dimensionality of city images embedded in the discourse conveyed on this space. A large-scale database is built from web crawling results for each of 264 cities recognized to be significant in the world; textual contents are extracted from the crawled web pages. The thematic dimensionality of the textual contents denotes how they are expressed, discussed, and shared on the Web; it is measured by quantified content analysis and multidimensional scaling based on the relative preponderance of the economic, cultural and political themes that cut across these contents. The web-based discourse on cities is found to be highly structured and to be responding to the geographies, histories, and socio-political context of each city. The analysis demonstrates the merit of the new interdisciplinary approach that integrates web-crawling, quantified content analysis, and multidimensional scaling to extract, assess, and visualize the image of cities from Web contents.
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Notes
- 1.
The number is 3,035,749,340 as of June 30, 2014.
- 2.
This is the title of 4th episode in The Virtual Revolution, which is the BBC documentary discussing the huge benefit and unforeseen downsides of the World Wide Web.
- 3.
Literature includes Hymer (1972), Cohen (1981), Reed (1981), Friedmann (1986), Rimmer (1991), London Planning Advisory Council (1991), Sassen (1994), Friedmann (1995), Keeling (1995), Knox (1995), Petrella (1995), Finnie (1998), Beaverstock et al. (1999), Short and Kim (1999), Thrift (1999), Taylor and Catalano (2000), Taylor et al. (2002), Kearney (2008), Knox et al. (2008), Mastercard (2008), Kearney (2010), EIU (2012), & UN DESA (2012).
- 4.
This geography is based on geographical regions and compositions of the UN DESA Statistics Division (2013).
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Appendix: List of Study Cities and Word Frequency Proportions
Appendix: List of Study Cities and Word Frequency Proportions
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Son, J.S., Thill, JC. (2018). Is Your City Economic, Cultural, or Political? Recognition of City Image Based on Multidimensional Scaling of Quantified Web Pages. In: Thill, JC. (eds) Spatial Analysis and Location Modeling in Urban and Regional Systems. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37896-6_4
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