The Rise and Fall of Twitter Data in Urban Analytics

Twitter has established itself as a valuable social media platform for urban research over the last 10 years, by providing free and accessible data. However, recent shift towards the monetization of its data, raises questions on its future use. To investigate this, bibliometric analysis and topic modeling techniques are used to explore trends in urban research publications and wider consequences of reduced data access. The results illustrate a period of ‘hype’ towards Twitter data, followed by decline in recent years. Application areas and topics are also identified, highlighting the distinct ways in which social media data contributes to urban research.