Monthly Archives: August 2021

Two NERDS summer papers: Streetonomics and COVID Twitter psychology

Prolific NERDS researcher Luca Maria Aiello published 2 more papers over the summer. They already received wide media coverage:

  1. Streetonomics: Quantifying culture using street names, by M. Bancilhon, M. Constantinides , E.P. Bogucka, L.M. Aiello, D. Quercia, published in PLOS ONE

    This paper studies the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York, finding that street names greatly reflect the extent to which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones, and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world, quantifying a society’s value system.

    The paper was covered in media here:
    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210712-streetonomics-what-our-addresses-say-about-us
    https://www.fastcompany.com/90652762/how-streets-in-new-york-london-paris-and-vienna-got-their-names-according-to-streetonomics
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/street-names-show-why-great-cities-are-worlds-apart-x06lbdwgj
    https://elpais.com/ciencia/2021-06-30/el-machismo-esta-en-las-calles.html
    https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/l-ame-d-une-ville-peut-elle-se-lire-dans-les-noms-de-ses-rues-20210701

  2. How epidemic psychology works on Twitter: evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., by L.M. Aiello, D. Quercia, K. Zhou, M. Constantinides, S. Šćepanović, S. Joglekar, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

    The paper studies the use of language of 122M tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic posted in the U.S. during the whole year of 2020. On Twitter, we identified three distinct phases. Each of them is characterized by different regimes of the three psycho-social epidemics.
    See also: https://www.fastcompany.com/90659372/pandemic-emotions-research-twitter

Release of GrowBike.Net to explore growing urban bicycle networks

Recently we released GrowBike.Net, accompanying our preprint “Growing Urban Bicycle Networks“. The interactive data visualization platform was developed by NERDS Master students Cecilia Laura Kolding Andersen and Morten Lynghede as part of their thesis “Developing an Interactive Visualization of Bicycle Network Growth” with Michael Szell.

GrowBike.Net lets you explore how to grow bicycle networks from scratch in 62 cities worldwide. Choose a city and grow the bike network, connecting places efficiently step by step.

The growth process creates a cohesive bicycle network – something that every modern city should have. Studying these synthetic networks informs us about the geometric limitations of urban bicycle network growth and can lead to better designed bicycle infrastructure in cities. GrowBike.Net also allows to compare the grown networks with your city’s existing bicycle network.

Although our approach here is not yet aiming to provide concrete urban design solutions, it could be useful for planning purposes for easily generating an initial vision of a cohesive bicycle network – to be re-fined subsequently.

The platform also features a media page where over 1000 videos and plots can be downloaded: http://growbike.net/download

Have fun exploring growing bike networks in your city!