Lab 2
Jasper Crossley Blasio, GEOG 458, Section AD
Topic: 3 Seattle Neighborhoods:
I chose to examine the most common terms associated with three neighborhoods of cultural importance in Seattle, those being Capitol Hill, Belltown, and the UDistrict. The search terms used for the scraping were "Capitol Hill Seattle" (To avoid drawing results for the US Federal Govt), "Belltown", and "University District".
I wanted to research these places, as while they share some similarities, all being parts of the city with a lot of culture in the arts and nightlife, they are pretty different parts of town, and I was curious what differences there may be in the general internet perception of these places.
The word clouds for the three areas all have some common ground, with "Seattle" or some variation being prominent, which is not surprising. "Neighborhood" shows up in both Capitol Hill and Belltown, but isn't really present in the UDistrict, perhaps indicating that the UDistrict is thought of more as a specific place than as a larger area or community. Belltown has a number of popular keywords related to descriptions of apartments, indicating maybe it has less cultural importance and is more commonly thought of through the lens of the residential real estate there. Capitol Hill's has some of this, but a greater emphasis on words referencing the percieved character of the neighborhood, like "eclectic", "authentic", or "walkable". Finally, while words related to crimes or other headline events showed up in all three word clouds to an extent, there were a noticably higher amount in the UDistrict's one. It isn't clear if this is due to increased prevalance of crime, or just the perception/coverage of the area. As for things that surprised me, I assumed there would be more mention of the bars and clubs in Belltown, and also that I didn't need to specify "Seattle" for the two neighborhoods other than Capitol Hill.
This research is quite limited in nature, due to the narrow scope and small size of the effort. In the future, if I were interested in further study of these places, I would use a web scraper that covers more general google searches (not just youtube), and collects a greater volume of data. Additionally, I would run a number of searches on each topic of note with slightly different terms, to get the greatest variety of sources possible.
