EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON MOBILITY MANAGEMENT

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

TEAMING UP FOR LIVEABLE CITIES
Faculty of Civil Engineering
Laboratory of Transport Engineering

Capturing the Mobility Week Posts on Social Media

Anastasia Nikolaidou, Mixael Pouliasis, Dr Ioannis Politis, Prof. Panagiotis Papaioannou
nikolaid@civil.auth.gr, mihalispouliasis@hotmail.com, pol@civil.auth.gr, papa@civil.auth.gr

I NT RODUCTI ON Location of tweets with the hash tag Mobility Week

The transformation of World Wide Web (WWW), from a passive consuming tool (Web 1.0) to
a dynamic user oriented communication instrument, has led to the rapid development of the
well-known Social Media nowadays. The unprocessed data that are generated daily by the
users of Social Media are considered as a new pool of data with high potential in various
areas of interest. Today the Big Data generated from the Social Media users are used by
various discipline areas such as the marketing, the real estate and the health industry etc.

Within the purpose of this paper, data mining approaches are used in order to extract
knowledge derived from Social Media users related with transport and mobility, and more
specific posts related with the concept of Mobility Week. Mobility week, is a Pan-European
initiative taking place each September from 16th to 22th.
The exploration of users network graph provides useful information regarding the user groups
from the main European countries (nodes), the interactions between them (edges) and the
MET HODOLOGICAL APPRO ACH languages used for the publications. Spanish are the ones who have shown the strongest
Data derived from the social microblogging and real time service Twitter were collected and activity in posts regarding the European Mobility Week, followed by British, Italians, French
further analysed. The Social Platform Twitter is considered as one of the most famous Social and Dutch. As for for the interactions between users from different countries, it is noted that
Media Worldwide (10th in the world Social Media list) and was selected as collection tool most users interact with users originating from the UK.
since its Application Programming Interphases (APIs) are more accessible and open compare
Twitter users network graph with hash tag Mobility Week
to other similar social media alternatives.

The hash tag Mobility Week (#mobilityweek) was chosen for the data collection, as it is the
official hash tag of the European Mobility Week that took place from 16 to 22 September 2016

The collection of data from Twitter last in total 23 days and it was conducted from 11/09//2016
till 3/11/2016. As expected, increased publication activity was observed during the European
Mobility Week (16-22 September 2016), whereas after the end of it, publications on this
specific area were almost zero.

The collection of tweets from the Twitter social network was conducted by using the NodeXL
Pro software, an open source template for Microsoft Excel developed by the Social Media
Research Foundation. Data derived from Twitter network contain information related both to
posts and to users.
Information extracted from Twitter with NodeXL
With the use of a technique called sentiment analysis, the sentiment that may be contained in
users posts was computed. based on predefined sentiment lexicons, available on NodeXL,
that contain words that express different sentiment. More specifically, NodeXL uses two

Type of Description sentiment lexicons, one with a list of words with positive sentiment and one with negative.
information These two lexicons contain both individual words and commonly used expression of two or
Relationship Type of post (tweet, mention one or more other users, reply to another three words.
users post)
Sentiment analysis of tweets with the hash tag Mobility Week
Tweet Date (UTC) Exact date and time (Coordinated Universal Time) on which the
publication was made
Negative sentiment Positive sentiment
Tweet Exact content of a post
Hash Tags in Hash tags that are included in a post
Tweet -15,16% 84,84%

Latitude & Latitude and longitude of the point from which the post was made when
Longitude a Twitter user posts his exact location via the GPS of his device -100% -80% -60% -40% -20% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Language (Tweet) Language in which a post was written Based on the results, it is obvious that the overall attitude of Twitter users around the hash tag
Place Country Country from which a post is published
of Mobility Week is positive. One in five posts contains the words sustainable and smart,
Name Name used on the Twitter by the user
which refer to sustainable development as well as to smart practices in transportation,
Followed Number of Twitter users who follow the user
concepts that have been strongly promoted during the European Mobility Week.
Followers Number of Twitter users followed by this user
Tweets Total number of posts made by the user
Location Place of permanent residence of the user
Time Zone Time zone to which users place of residence belongs
CO NCL USIONS
Language (User) Users native language The activity of Twitter users is intense on the occasion of the European Mobility Week
(15.161 tweets), while the majority of posts, as found by the mapping of tweets, were
published from the Netherlands, a quite sustainable country.
The geolocation of Social Media Posts can be used for in depth analysis of success (or not)
KEY FINDINGS & RESULTS
stories and provide useful insights about positive or negative feelings towards various policy
In total, 15.161 posts containing the hash tag Mobility Week were collected. The collected
interventions like that of Mobility Week.
posts were made by 6.631 unique users, thus meaning that each user publishes an average
Social Media are playing today a vital role on understanding individual behavior, preferences
of 2,6 posts containing the selected hash tag. The majority of users were from Europe.
and attitudes.
Posts that included location sharing, either by using GPS or by manually adding location Mining and analyzing social media data may enable public authorities to better understand
information in posts by users were further analyzed in an attempt to determine whether there public views, needs and opinions where insight into users needs and opinions could help
are variations in users activity based on their location. Most tweets are posted from authorities obtain feedback about services, strategies and current policies.
Netherlands, Italy and Spain, whereas it is observed that in the Greater London area there is Social media data can be considered as a supplementary data to traditional approaches of
almost zero activity. gathering transport data like traffic counts and household and questionnaire surveys.