Polyphonic images of the cities. Mapping new human landscapes through User Generated Content

Abstract

'Visualizing the crisis' is a research project that explores the potential of text mining methods applied to geo-localized user generated content in order to extract and analyze the emotional reaction of Italian people to the current political crisis. The project focused on building a platform that harvests and integrates real-time data streams coming from geo-localized user generated content and then applies text mining processes in order to extract users' emotional reactions and plot them on a map. The project started analyzing users' emotional temperature in the two major Italian cities (Rome and Milan) in November 2011, when Silvio Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority and Mario Monti was nominated Prime Minister. The idea behind the project was to create a framework to continuously listen and monitor urban actors' emotional reactions and enhance their sense of agency and their responsiveness during the current period of political and economical transformations in Italy. The paper introduces the theoretical background and the technological characteristics of the platform and presents a short selection of interesting patterns and urban stories we came across during the early phase of the study. Some relevant images are presented and discussed as well.