The Human Geography of Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter data from England and Wales to identify regional social identities and communication patterns, revealing regional prominence, sentiment biases, and political discourse dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology combining geographic and social media data to study inter- and intra-regional communication and identity.

Findings

South-East and North-West are most discussed regions

Regions show more positive sentiment about themselves

Inter-regional political communication is more frequent than intra-regional

Abstract

Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration we aim to quantitatively study inter- and intra-regional communication for the first time. This work uses social media posts to first identify contiguous geographical regions with a shared social identity and then investigate patterns of communication within and between them. Our case study uses over 150 days of located Twitter data from England and Wales. In contrast to other approaches, (e.g. phone call data records or online friendship networks) we have the message contents as well as the social connection. This allows us to investigate not only the volume of communication but also the sentiment and vocabulary. We find that the South-East and North-West regions are the most talked about; regions tend to be more positive about themselves than about others; people talk politics much more between regions than within. This methodology gives researchers a powerful tool to study identity and interaction within and between social-geographic regions.