Revisiting Image of the City in Cyberspace: Analysis of Spatial Twitter Messages During a Special Event

ABSTRACT

This research investigated people’s communication of urban space as reflected in Twitter messages (tweets) during the 2012 Super Bowl. The authors archived over 600,000 tweets related to the Super Bowl from January 23 through early February 6. The authors identified 78 Indianapolis-area places or routes named in the tweets. Based on occurrence of these terms, the authors retained 9,103 city-specific messages for analysis. The frequency of such tweets changed over the two-week period and peaked two days before game day. Instances of all of Lynch’s (1960) The Image of the City elements (node, district, landmark, path, and edge) were found in the tweets. While node-referencing terms were most common among the 78 spatial identifiers, district and landmark references were most common in the tweet sample. Edge references were almost non-existent and only occurred as named waterways. This research has implications for city-oriented social media monitoring efforts for future special events.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban space
• Twitter
• communication
• Super Bowl
• image of the city

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Junfeng Jiao is an assistant professor in Community and Regional Planning and director of the Urban Information Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. He led this Twitter Super Bowl Study.

Michael Holmes is a professor in Journalism at Ball State University. He worked on the research design, data analysis, and the composition of the paper.

Greg P. Griffin is a PhD student in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. He assisted in the composition and revision of the paper.