Online Conversations in Changing Neighborhoods

In this study, we explore online communication about gentrification in one Chicago neighborhood. Using data mining techniques, we identify patterns in online conversations to understand how residents discuss neighborhood change, social capital, and collective efficacy. Our overall goal of the project is to inform the design of community-based technologies that facilitate communication amongst residents who are newcomers and predecessors.We built scrapers for sites such as Yelp, Everyblock, and Reddit using Python and Scrapy. This resulted in over 10,000 comments which we began to analyze using inductive qualitative analysis in Atlas.Ti. Click HERE to learn about the design and development process