Information diffusion between Dutch cities: Revisiting Zipf and Pred using a computational social science approach

Abstract News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand urban system dynamics. However, because of limited resources in data acquisition, they restricted their studies to small samples of cities or short periods of time. By using novel computational social science techniques on a digital archive of historical newspapers, we could map and explore changes in the spatial extent of news coverage in the Netherlands at an unprecedented detailed scale for a period of 62 years. In this paper, we analyse 24 million news items mentioning 312 different cities and towns in a sample of 31 local newspapers. Thanks to this data, we were able to reconstruct the information field of urban readerships from different cities and how it changed over time. By analysing their evolution, we find evidence of space-time contraction with an increasing coverage of faraway places in the period ranging from 1869 to 1930. However, this coverage is not evenly distributed but is characterized by a hierarchical selection process. Coverage of the largest cities in the Randstad increased at the expense of information flows from intermediate provincial cities. More generally, this paper shows how computational social science approaches may offer new ways of looking at urban dynamics with large text corpora such as digital archives of historical newspapers.

[1]  S. Strogatz,et al.  Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions , 2010, PloS one.

[2]  A. Franc,et al.  Emergence of an integrated city-system in France (XVIIth–XIXth centuries): Evidence from toolset in graph theory , 2017 .

[3]  Gunnar Törnqvist.  Flows of information and the location of economic activities , 1968 .

[4]  M. Castells.  Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture , 1996 .

[5]  F. Calabrese,et al.  Urban gravity: a model for inter-city telecommunication flows , 2009, 0905.0692.

[6]  Zbigniew Smoreda,et al.  Identifying and modeling the structural discontinuities of human interactions , 2015, Scientific Reports.

[7]  Rens Bod.  Who's afraid of Patterns?: The Particular versus the Universal and the Meaning of Humanities 3.0 , 2013 .

[8]  R. Schwartz,et al.  Spatial History: Railways, Uneven Development, and Population Change in France and Great Britain, 1850–1914 , 2011, Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

[9]  M. van Ham,et al.  The Evolution of the Systems of Cities Literature Since 1995: Schools of Thought and their Interaction , 2018, Networks and Spatial Economics.

[10]  A. Pred,et al.  Urban growth and the circulation of information : the United States system of cities, 1790-1840 , 1973 .

[11]  B. Derudder,et al.  World City Network: A global urban analysis , 2003 .

[12]  Claude Grasland,et al.  International news flow theory revisited through a space–time interaction model: Application to a sample of 320,000 international news stories published through RSS flows by 31 daily newspapers in 2015 , 2020, International Communication Gazette.

[13]  M. Batty.  The New Science of Cities , 2013 .

[14]  Richard L. Meier,et al.  A communications theory of urban growth , 1963 .

[15]  M. Burger,et al.  Borrowing size in networks of cities: City size, network connectivity and metropolitan functions in Europe , 2016 .

[16]  A. Pred,et al.  City-systems in advanced economies: Past growth, present processes and future development options , 1977 .

[17]  A. Frémont,et al.  La région, espace vécu , 1976 .

[18]  Frank van Oort,et al.  Examining Spatial Structure Using Gravity Models , 2019, The Mathematics of Urban Morphology.

[19]  Peter J. Taylor,et al.  Specification of the World City Network , 2010 .

[20]  Laurent Jégou,et al.  The world network of scientific collaborations between cities: domestic or international dynamics? , 2016, J. Informetrics.

[21]  Denise Pumain,et al.  Systems of Cities and Levels of Organisation , 2011 .

[22]  B. Derudder,et al.  Hierarchical Tendencies and Regional Patterns in the World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis of 234 Cities , 2003 .

[23]  G. Zipf.  The P 1 P 2 D Hypothesis: On the Intercity Movement of Persons , 1946 .

[24]  Nello Cristianini,et al.  Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals , 2017, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[25]  Etienne Huens,et al.  Geographical dispersal of mobile communication networks , 2008, 0802.2178.

[26]  Antoine Peris,et al.  One century of information diffusion in the Netherlands derived from a massive digital archive of historical newspapers: the DIGGER dataset , 2020, Cybergeo.

[27]  G K ZIPF.  Some determinants of the circulation of information. , 1946, The American journal of psychology.

[28]  C. Board,et al.  The structure of the South African space economy: An integrated approach , 1970 .

[29]  Hadrien Commenges,et al.  Modèle de radiation et modèle gravitaire - Du formalisme à l'usage , 2016, Rev. Int. Géomatique.

[30]  J. Q. Stewart.  A Measure of the Influence of a Population at a Distance , 1942 .

[31]  Albert Meroño-Peñuela,et al.  The Aggregate Dutch Historical Censuses , 2015 .

[32]  Junho Choi,et al.  Comparing world city networks: a network analysis of Internet backbone and air transport intercity linkages , 2006 .

[33]  Marta C. González,et al.  A universal model for mobility and migration patterns , 2011, Nature.

[34]  M. Batty,et al.  Gravity versus radiation models: on the importance of scale and heterogeneity in commuting flows. , 2012, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[35]  S. Sassen.  The Global City , 1992 .

[36]  J. Offner.  Les « effets structurants » du transport : mythe politique, mystification scientifique , 1993 .

[37]  Xinyue Ye,et al.  Extracting and analyzing semantic relatedness between cities using news articles , 2017, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[38]  Patrick Guillaumont,et al.  Has Distance Died? Evidence from a Panel Gravity Model , 2002 .

[39]  Sara Irina Fabrikant,et al.  Spatialization of user-generated content to uncover the multirelational world city network , 2016 .

[40]  D. Pumain,et al.  Simulating Urban Networks through Multiscalar Space-Time Dynamics: Europe and the United States, 17th-20th Centuries , 2010 .

[41]  Yunsong Chen,et al.  Local name, global fame: The international visibility of Chinese cities in modern times , 2017 .

[42]  Antoine Peris,et al.  Using toponym co-occurrences to measure relationships between places: review, application and evaluation , 2018, International Journal of Urban Sciences.

[43]  Torsten Hägerstrand,et al.  Innovation Diffusion As a Spatial Process , 1967 .

[44]  Donald G. Janelle,et al.  CENTRAL PLACE DEVELOPMENT IN A TIME‐SPACE FRAMEWORK * , 1968 .

[45]  Ate Poorthuis,et al.  Follow thy neighbor: Connecting the social and the spatial networks on Twitter , 2015, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[46]  Michiel van Meeteren.  A prehistory of the polycentric urban region: excavating Dutch applied geography, 1930–60 , 2020, Regional Studies.

[47]  Alan Wilson,et al.  A Family of Spatial Interaction Models, and Associated Developments , 1971 .

[48]  Jonathan V. Beaverstock,et al.  Globalization and world cities: some measurement methodologies , 2000 .