Economy and Geography Shape the Collective Attention of Cities
Ke-ke Shang, Jiangli Zhu, Junfan Yi, Liwen Zhang, Junjie Yang, Ge Guo, Zixuan Jin, Michael Small

TL;DR
This study investigates how economic and geographic factors influence collective attention in cities, revealing that wealthier cities tend to be central and influential within their attention networks, with regional differences in population effects.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive analysis combining attention networks with economic and geographic data, highlighting the roles of GDP and location in urban attention patterns.
Findings
High-GDP cities act as core nodes in attention networks.
Geographic proximity and topical coherence are linked in urban clusters.
Population size influences attention in the US but not in China.
Abstract
Complex networks are commonly used to explore human behavior. However, previous studies largely overlooked the geographical and economic factors embedded in collective attention. To address this, we construct attention networks from time-series data for the United States and China, each a key economic power in the West and the East, respectively. We reveal a strong macroscale correlation between urban attention and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the mesoscale, community detection of attention networks shows that high-GDP cities consistently act as core nodes within their communities and occupy strategic geographic positions. At the microscale, structural hole theory identifies these cities as key connectors between communities, with influence proportional to economic output. Overlapping community detection further reveals tightly connected urban clusters, prompting us to introduce…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHuman Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Data Visualization and Analytics · Impact of Light on Environment and Health
