Local emotions - using social media to understand human-environment interaction in cities

Abstract

Cities have become the most common living environment for humans. With this rising urbanization, urban design has become vital for these growing cities. While measuring objective data like traffic congestion or air quality is important, it does not tell the whole story of how people live in the cities or how cities should be developed to make them more livable. In future for a true smart city a more humane component is needed to understand how the population of cities actually interact with and feel about their surroundings. Surveys are a great and a necessary tool for this and they are already being used in the design process. However, they require effort and and a lot of silent information can be missed. The surveying process also doesn't happen in real time. We suggest that social media data could be used to gather more information about human- environment interaction in cities and compliment the surveys. We show a working prototype of a tool that creates an emotional map of a city by mining social media data for sentiments and heatmapping them. This kind of method could prove to be an useful tool for urban designers, who could take advantage of the visual intuition of humans and see instantly where and how emotional hotspots arise. It could also be of interest for emotion researchers, who could get data on what it really means to be happy for a human being - for example eating an ice cream at the beach - instead of only linking conceptual words (such as happy) to external stimuli (such as smiling).