"A river of hope"? A topic modeling analysis of Bronx River representations in the New York Times and on Twitter

Keywords: place stigma; urban geography; digital geography; topic modeling; social representations of place
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Congressman José Serrano called the Bronx River a “symbol of hope.” On the other hand, Donica (2018) argues that the media set a ruin-porn-based agenda that highlights destruction and decay in the Bronx. To what extent does coverage of the Bronx River mirror Serrano’s vision of hope rather than this ruin-porn agenda? In this paper, we use topic modeling and sentiment analysis to describe and compare social representations of the Bronx River in a traditional, elite media source, The New York Times, and on the social media site Twitter. Although top topics in both corpora point to the importance of environmental issues in Bronx River coverage, our Twitter analysis suggests that Environmental Twitter users may be tweeting to an “issue public”: a small but devoted group of followers who care about the Bronx River environment. When people tweet about the Bronx River and “environment,” their tweets tend to have positively-valenced words. We found a potential negativity bias, however, in our overall Twitter corpus. Thematic analysis of NYTimes articles about the Bronx River illustrated the ways in which journalists nested symbolic meanings related to degradation, restoration, wildness, and urbanity.