The Tweet and the City: Comparing Twitter Activities in Informational World Cities

This paper informetrically monitors Twitter activities that are related to 31 Informational World Cities. It is a big data analysis of 18 million tweets that have been downloaded via Twitter’s Search API (content-based approach) and Twitter’s Streaming API (location-based approach). The Tweets have been filtered either by search terms (i. e. the city’s name) or geo-locations (coordinates of a city). The analysis was made by mainly using quantitative statistic methods endorsed by several qualitative investigations. It shows that tweet activity related to Informational World Cities varies from city to city. A city’s area or its size of population does not necessarily affect these activities. Factors like the penetration rate of smart phones, number of tourists etc. influences the amount of tweets that are produced in or about a city. Topics are mostly event-driven or related to sports and politics. City names are popular in spam tweets and they are often chained to draw the attention to messages which are not city-related at all (e. g., religious comments). The paper presents an approach for quantitatively analysing tweeting behaviour in Information World Cities to prospectively find distinct indicators of how Twitter activities in Informational World Cities can be classified and how they vary between the different cities.