THE BLOG + THE TERRITORY Exploring the relationship between hyperlocal media and local space

ABSTRACT: Hyperlocal media are broadly defined as online platforms for news and other informational content relevant to a specific geographic locality: a whole city, an administrative area like a borough, an informally-defined neighbourhood or even an individual street or estate. Brockley Central, “the home for all things Brockley (SE4), Deptford, Ladywell, Lewisham and New Cross” is one of the longest-running and best known hyperlocal blogs, focused on the neighbourhood of Brockley and its high street and but also reaching into surrounding areas. This poster presents one part of a broader research project that through various complementary methodologies attempts to describe the relationship between the blog, Brockley Central, and the urban territory to which it pertains. Here, we map Brockley Central’s Twitter followers both in network terms and geographically. Brockley Central’s Twitter network is defined as a graph of all its followers and the following relationships between them. Analysis reveals concentrations of following relationships that in network terms are defined as communities, and shows the degree of connectivity of each user. Profiles that can be pinpointed geographically, belonging to local businesses for example, are highlighted on a map. Network communities turn out to be markedly geographical groupings, and centrality within Brockley linked to greater connection within Brockley Central’s Twitter network. Bricks-and-mortar businesses visible within Brockley and its surrounding areas also appear to be key parts of the network, helping distribute local news. Although a single case, this is a preliminary step showing the potential for further research linking mediated social networks and their manifestation in urban space.

METHODOLOGY: In a social network graph, vertices represent individual Twitter profiles with specific usernames and edges a following relationship in either direction between vertices. Brockley Central’s (BC) network is thus is defined as a graph which comprises of a set of interconnected followers one step away from BC and all the connections between them within Twitter. For every vertex a value was generated showing its degree within the @BC- centric graph: that is, the number of other vertices to which it is connected within that graph or the total number of that profile’s friends and followers that are also followers of @BC. The community detection method used to identify @BC sub-graphs partitions the graph according to a quality function called modularity (Newman, 2006). This partitioning resulted in eight modularity classes each representing a sub-graph of more densely connected vertices within the wider @BC-centric network.

Location information was recorded to the greatest degree of accuracy possible. For some this meant the level of a local neighbourhood or borough, but wherever a specific location could be determined (ie for a business or public amenity) its postcode was recorded from Google Maps. For the 90 profiles for which a specific location in space could be pinpointed (ie postcode), coordinates were generated for each profile by geocoding postcode data using the online service GPS Visualiser. This allows the vertices to be represented as points on a map and visualized according to their data attributes.

Newman, M.E.J., 2006. Modularity and community structure in networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 103, 8577–8582.

JOHN BINGHAM-HALL @public_culture

STEPHEN LAW @urban_stevie

UCL BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE