Hyperlink Network System and Image of Global Cities: Webpages and Their Contents

1 online resource (229 pages) : PDF

2014

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

A distinctive trend of globalization research is a conceptual expansion that mirrors the penetration of globalization in various aspects of life. The World Wide Web has become the ultimate platform to create and disseminate information in this era of globalization. Although the importance of web-based information is widely acknowledged, the use of this information in global city research is not significant yet. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to extend the concept of globalization to the efficiency of information networks and the thematic dimensionality of the conveyed images from webpages.To this end, 264 global and globalizing cities are selected. The city hyperlink networks are constructed from the web crawling results of each city, and hyperlink network analysis measures the effectiveness of these hyperlink networks. The textual contents are also extracted from the crawled webpages, and the thematic dimensionality of the textual contents is measured by quantified content analysis and multidimensional scaling.The efficiency of the hyperlink network in information flow is confirmed to be a new consideration that shapes the globality of cities. The cities with high efficiency of connections have faster and easier access, which means better structure for city image formation. Specifically, social networking websites are the center of this information flow. This means that social interactions on the Web play a crucial role to form the images of cities. Apart from the positivity and the negativity of the city image, the dimensionality of cities on the thematic space denotes how they are expressed, discussed, and shared on the Web. The image status based on dimensions of globalization is an important starting point to city branding. It is concluded that a research framework handling information networks and images simultaneously deepens the understanding of how the structure and the contents on the Web affect the formation and maintenance of global city networks. Overall, this research demonstrates the usefulness of information networks and images of cities on the Web to overcome data inconsistency and scarcity in global city research.

doctoral dissertations

Geography

Ph.D.

Branding City
City Image
Global City
Globalization
Hyperlink Network System
Quantified Content Analysis

Geography & Urban Regional Analysis

Thill, Jean-Claude

Wang, Qingfang
Delmelle, Eric
Jiang, Min

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2014.

This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). For additional information, see http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/.

Copyright is held by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Son_uncc_0694D_10633

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:1544