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Information diffusion between Dutch cities : revisiting Zipf and Pred using a computational social science approach

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Peris_2020_CEUS_Informationdiffusion_CC.pdf (4.181Mb)
Date
01/2021
Author
Peris, Antoine
Meijers, Evert
Van Ham, Maarten
Keywords
System of cities
Information flows
Gravity model
Netherlands
Historical newspapers
HE Transportation and Communications
HT Communities. Classes. Races
ZA4050 Electronic information resources
3rd-DAS
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Abstract
News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand urban system dynamics. However, because of limited resources in data acquisition, they restricted their studies to small samples of cities or short periods of time. By using novel computational social science techniques on a digital archive of historical newspapers, we could map and explore changes in the spatial extent of news coverage in the Netherlands at an unprecedented detailed scale for a period of 62 years. In this paper, we analyse 24 million news items mentioning 312 different cities and towns in a sample of 31 local newspapers. Thanks to this data, we were able to reconstruct the information field of urban readerships from different cities and how it changed over time. By analysing their evolution, we find evidence of space-time contraction with an increasing coverage of faraway places in the period ranging from 1869 to 1930. However, this coverage is not evenly distributed but is characterized by a hierarchical selection process. Coverage of the largest cities in the Randstad increased at the expense of information flows from intermediate provincial cities. More generally, this paper shows how computational social science approaches may offer new ways of looking at urban dynamics with large text corpora such as digital archives of historical newspapers.
Citation
Peris , A , Meijers , E & Van Ham , M 2021 , ' Information diffusion between Dutch cities : revisiting Zipf and Pred using a computational social science approach ' , Computers, Environment and Urban Systems , vol. 85 , 101565 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101565
Publication
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101565
ISSN
0198-9715
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Description
Funding: This work was funded through a VIDI grant (452-14-004) provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientic Research (NWO), and through the researcher-in-residence program of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the national library of the Netherlands.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/20956

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