Urbanscope: A Lens to Observe Language Mix in Cities

Abstract

Cities of the 21st century are places where various actors interact, where physical systems, that are sometime geographically distant, are strictly dependent, where relational mechanisms become crucial, and where the boundaries between individual and collective, local and global, real and digital become more and more blurred. In this context, social media can be used as a digital lens to analyze the space and the territory of cities. In fact, they offer a great opportunity to individualize and understand the connections that might exist between different spheres. In this article, we use Twitter to analyze the language mix of the city and to detect language communities within the city neighborhoods. We then compare these “digital” communities, discovered through Twitter, with the “real” communities identified by the traditional census data. Milan, a city which is increasingly becoming an international melting pot, is chosen as a case study for this work.