Researchers Track Twitter to Learn What People Value in New York City Parks

North Carolina State University researchers found they could use Twitter to understand changes in what New York City park users valued most about four iconic city parks before and after COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect. The researchers also found Twitter useful for tracking complaints about individual parks. The findings indicate social media could be an important tool for park managers, park planners or others to respond in real time to changes in users’ needs or to plan for future parks, potentially faster than using traditional survey-based methods. “We found that you can pull out detail about individual parks, as well as track what people value in parks, complaints they had about specific events, and even broader societal issues that people are talking about,” said study co-author Aaron Hipp, associate professor of community health and sustainability at NC State. “While we have some additional work to automate this and get closer to real-time monitoring, we think our findings indicate that parks can monitor this information and feel confident that some of the social media traffic can be a pretty reliable reflection of public sentiments.” For the study, researchers tracked tweets about Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Flushing Meadows in…
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