A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods

Neighbourhoods have been described by the UK Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government as the “building blocks of public service society”. Despite this, difficulties in data collection combined with the concept’s subjective nature have left most countries lacking official neighbourhoo...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Brindley, Paul, Goulding, James, Wilson, Max L.
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Published: ACM 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31333/
_version_ 1848794179587538944
author Brindley, Paul
Goulding, James
Wilson, Max L.
author_facet Brindley, Paul
Goulding, James
Wilson, Max L.
author_sort Brindley, Paul
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description Neighbourhoods have been described by the UK Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government as the “building blocks of public service society”. Despite this, difficulties in data collection combined with the concept’s subjective nature have left most countries lacking official neighbourhood definitions. This issue has implications not only for policy, but for the field of computational social science as a whole (with many studies being forced to use administrative units as proxies despite the fact that these bear little connection to resident perceptions of social boundaries). In this paper we illustrate that the mass linguistic datasets now available on the internet need only be combined with relatively simple linguistic computational models to produce definitions that are not only probabilistic and dynamic, but do not require a priori knowledge of neighbourhood names.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T19:12:05Z
format Conference or Workshop Item
id nottingham-31333
institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T19:12:05Z
publishDate 2014
publisher ACM
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling nottingham-313332020-05-04T20:16:11Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31333/ A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods Brindley, Paul Goulding, James Wilson, Max L. Neighbourhoods have been described by the UK Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government as the “building blocks of public service society”. Despite this, difficulties in data collection combined with the concept’s subjective nature have left most countries lacking official neighbourhood definitions. This issue has implications not only for policy, but for the field of computational social science as a whole (with many studies being forced to use administrative units as proxies despite the fact that these bear little connection to resident perceptions of social boundaries). In this paper we illustrate that the mass linguistic datasets now available on the internet need only be combined with relatively simple linguistic computational models to produce definitions that are not only probabilistic and dynamic, but do not require a priori knowledge of neighbourhood names. ACM 2014 Conference or Workshop Item PeerReviewed Brindley, Paul, Goulding, James and Wilson, Max L. (2014) A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods. In: 22nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, 4-7 November 2014, Dallas, Texas, USA. neighbourhoods spatial data mining vernacular geography http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2666310.2666473
spellingShingle neighbourhoods
spatial data mining
vernacular geography
Brindley, Paul
Goulding, James
Wilson, Max L.
A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title_full A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title_fullStr A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title_full_unstemmed A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title_short A data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
title_sort data driven approach to mapping urban neighbourhoods
topic neighbourhoods
spatial data mining
vernacular geography
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31333/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31333/