TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping cognitive place associations within the United Kingdom through online discussion on Reddit
AU - Berragan, Cillian
AU - Singleton, Alex
AU - Calafiore, Alessia
AU - Morley, Jeremy
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank all the reviewers for their constructive comments that supported the publication of this paper. Thank you also to Ordnance Survey and the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/P000401/1) for financially supporting this work.
Publisher Copyright:
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2024 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).
PY - 2024/1/8
Y1 - 2024/1/8
N2 - This paper explores cognitive place associations; conceptualised as a place-based mental model that derives subconscious links between geographic locations. Utilising a large corpus of online discussion data from the social media website Reddit, we experiment on the extraction of such geographic knowledge from unstructured text. First we construct a system to identify place names found in Reddit comments, disambiguating each to a set of coordinates where possible. Following this, we build a collective picture of cognitive place associations in the United Kingdom, linking locations that co-occur in user comments and evaluating the effect of distance on the strength of these associations. Exploring these geographies nationally, associations were shown to be typically weaker over greater distances. This distance decay is also highly regional, rural areas typically have greater levels of distance decay, particularly in Wales and Scotland. When comparing major cities across the UK, we observe distinct distance decay patterns, influenced primarily by proximity to other cities.
AB - This paper explores cognitive place associations; conceptualised as a place-based mental model that derives subconscious links between geographic locations. Utilising a large corpus of online discussion data from the social media website Reddit, we experiment on the extraction of such geographic knowledge from unstructured text. First we construct a system to identify place names found in Reddit comments, disambiguating each to a set of coordinates where possible. Following this, we build a collective picture of cognitive place associations in the United Kingdom, linking locations that co-occur in user comments and evaluating the effect of distance on the strength of these associations. Exploring these geographies nationally, associations were shown to be typically weaker over greater distances. This distance decay is also highly regional, rural areas typically have greater levels of distance decay, particularly in Wales and Scotland. When comparing major cities across the UK, we observe distinct distance decay patterns, influenced primarily by proximity to other cities.
KW - cognitive place connectivity
KW - distance decay
KW - geoparsing
KW - mental maps
KW - natural language processing
KW - United Kingdom
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85181700548&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/tran.12669
DO - 10.1111/tran.12669
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85181700548
SN - 0020-2754
VL - 49
SP - 1
EP - 18
JO - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
JF - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
IS - 3
M1 - e12669
ER -