Using social media data to identify neighbourhood change

Abstract. This paper explores the use social media data from Twitter to capture perceptions of neighbourhood characteristics, in relation to gentrification. It does this by defining a rudimentary lexicon of words associated with gentrification which was used to calculate gentrification scores for geo-located tweets. These were then interpolated to create the surfaces describing the spatial and temporal patterns of gentrification. There are a number of limitations to the methods used in this study, which are discussed and a number of related areas of future work are indicated.