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dc.contributor.authorPeris, Antoine
dc.contributor.authorMeijers, Evert
dc.contributor.authorVan Ham, Maarten
dc.date.accessioned2020-11-12T10:30:08Z
dc.date.available2020-11-12T10:30:08Z
dc.date.issued2021-01
dc.identifier.citationPeris , 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.2020.101565en
dc.identifier.issn0198-9715
dc.identifier.otherPURE: 271050296
dc.identifier.otherPURE UUID: 30a878a5-ff95-45ef-bee1-b6d4d45f3808
dc.identifier.otherORCID: /0000-0002-2106-0702/work/83481710
dc.identifier.otherScopus: 85096234428
dc.identifier.otherWOS: 000596814400012
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10023/20956
dc.descriptionFunding: 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.en
dc.description.abstractNews 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.
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.ispartofComputers, Environment and Urban Systemsen
dc.rightsCopyright © 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/).en
dc.subjectSystem of citiesen
dc.subjectInformation flowsen
dc.subjectGravity modelen
dc.subjectNetherlandsen
dc.subjectHistorical newspapersen
dc.subjectHE Transportation and Communicationsen
dc.subjectHT Communities. Classes. Racesen
dc.subjectZA4050 Electronic information resourcesen
dc.subject3rd-DASen
dc.subjectSDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communitiesen
dc.subject.lccHEen
dc.subject.lccHTen
dc.subject.lccZA4050en
dc.titleInformation diffusion between Dutch cities : revisiting Zipf and Pred using a computational social science approachen
dc.typeJournal articleen
dc.description.versionPublisher PDFen
dc.contributor.institutionUniversity of St Andrews. Population and Health Researchen
dc.contributor.institutionUniversity of St Andrews. School of Geography & Sustainable Developmenten
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101565
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden


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