Assessing the Impact of Cultural Planning in the Age of Social Media: Twitter-Based Indicators for Established and Emerging Art Locations

Abstract

Planning administrations are concerned with the diffusion of art. The concept of the Creative City has encouraged planners to develop cultural policies to support creative economies, city branding, urban identity and urban quality. With the introduction of social media, the production and consumption of art is changing significantly. It has resulted in the emergence of hybrid art spaces: social spaces existing both in physical space and on social media. This implies that the integration of social media data in cultural planning is not just beneficial, but necessary. However, existing cultural planning approaches hardly consider this shifting paradigm. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to analyze, map and evaluate art venues and the online communication they generate using social media data. We developed this methodology for Singapore. We gathered geo-located Twitter data and extracted posts relating to art (Social Media Art Classifier). We applied topic and sentiment analysis to art tweets, and introduced social media-based planning indicators. We also developed a machine learning model to determine the relationship between 11 art venue features and the level of their social media production. This methodology successfully demonstrates the use of social media data to support cultural planning in cities. While the work presented in this paper focuses on Singapore, and is limited to a two-year data period, our methodology could easily be adapted for other locales, and to include continuous assessment. As a next step, we will demonstrate and discuss our methodology with cultural planning professionals, in order to improve our methods and indicators, and explore some of the applications suggested in this paper.