IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jftint/v16y2023i1p3-d1305841.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Investigating the Key Aspects of a Smart City through Topic Modeling and Thematic Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Anestis Kousis

    (Department of Science and Technology, International Hellenic University, 14th km Thessaloniki-N. Moudania National Road, 57001 Thermi, Greece)

  • Christos Tjortjis

    (Department of Science and Technology, International Hellenic University, 14th km Thessaloniki-N. Moudania National Road, 57001 Thermi, Greece)

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence of the smart city concept has garnered attention as a promising innovation aimed at addressing the multifactorial challenges arising from the concurrent trends of urban population growth and the climate crisis. In this study, we delve into the multifaceted dimensions of the smart city paradigm to unveil its underlying structure, employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques. To achieve this, we collected textual data from three sources: scientific publication abstracts, news blog posts, and social media entries. For the analysis of this textual data, we introduce an innovative semi-automated methodology that integrates topic modeling and thematic analysis. Our findings highlight the intricate nature of the smart city domain, which necessitates examination from three perspectives: applications, technology, and socio-economic perspective. Through our analysis, we identified ten distinct aspects of the smart city paradigm, encompassing mobility, energy, infrastructure, environment, IoT, data, business, planning and administration, security, and people. When comparing the outcomes across the three diverse datasets, we noted a relative lack of attention within the scientific community towards certain aspects, notably in the realm of business, as well as themes relevant to citizens’ everyday lives, such as food, shopping, and green spaces. This work reveals the underlying thematic structure of the smart city concept to help researchers, practitioners, and public administrators participate effectively in smart city transformation initiatives. Furthermore, it introduces a novel data-driven method for conducting thematic analysis on large text datasets.

Suggested Citation

  • Anestis Kousis & Christos Tjortjis, 2023. "Investigating the Key Aspects of a Smart City through Topic Modeling and Thematic Analysis," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-39, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jftint:v:16:y:2023:i:1:p:3-:d:1305841
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/16/1/3/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/16/1/3/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Scott Deerwester & Susan T. Dumais & George W. Furnas & Thomas K. Landauer & Richard Harshman, 1990. "Indexing by latent semantic analysis," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 41(6), pages 391-407, September.
    2. Fernando Almeida, 2023. "Prospects of Cybersecurity in Smart Cities," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 15(9), pages 1-21, August.
    3. Siyam, Nur & Alqaryouti, Omar & Abdallah, Sherief, 2020. "Mining government tweets to identify and predict citizens engagement," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Curci, Ylenia & Mongeau Ospina, Christian A., 2016. "Investigating biofuels through network analysis," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 60-72.
    2. Chao Wei & Senlin Luo & Xincheng Ma & Hao Ren & Ji Zhang & Limin Pan, 2016. "Locally Embedding Autoencoders: A Semi-Supervised Manifold Learning Approach of Document Representation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(1), pages 1-20, January.
    3. Maksym Polyakov & Morteza Chalak & Md. Sayed Iftekhar & Ram Pandit & Sorada Tapsuwan & Fan Zhang & Chunbo Ma, 2018. "Authorship, Collaboration, Topics, and Research Gaps in Environmental and Resource Economics 1991–2015," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 71(1), pages 217-239, September.
    4. Ding, Ying, 2011. "Community detection: Topological vs. topical," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 498-514.
    5. Juan Shi & Kin Keung Lai & Ping Hu & Gang Chen, 2018. "Factors dominating individual information disseminating behavior on social networking sites," Information Technology and Management, Springer, vol. 19(2), pages 121-139, June.
    6. Ganesh Dash & Chetan Sharma & Shamneesh Sharma, 2023. "Sustainable Marketing and the Role of Social Media: An Experimental Study Using Natural Language Processing (NLP)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-16, March.
    7. Paola Cerchiello & Giancarlo Nicola, 2018. "Assessing News Contagion in Finance," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 6(1), pages 1-19, February.
    8. Shr-Wei Kao & Pin Luarn, 2020. "Topic Modeling Analysis of Social Enterprises: Twitter Evidence," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-20, April.
    9. Gissler, Stefan & Oldfather, Jeremy & Ruffino, Doriana, 2016. "Lending on hold: Regulatory uncertainty and bank lending standards," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 89-101.
    10. Alina Evstigneeva & Mark Sidorovskiy, 2021. "Assessment of Clarity of Bank of Russia Monetary Policy Communication by Neural Network Approach," Russian Journal of Money and Finance, Bank of Russia, vol. 80(3), pages 3-33, September.
    11. Hei-Chia Wang & Tzu-Ting Hsu & Yunita Sari, 2019. "Personal research idea recommendation using research trends and a hierarchical topic model," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1385-1406, December.
    12. Marcin Chlebus & Maciej Stefan Świtała, 2020. "So close and so far. Finding similar tendencies in econometrics and machine learning papers. Topic models comparison," Working Papers 2020-16, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    13. De Caigny, Arno & Coussement, Kristof & De Bock, Koen W. & Lessmann, Stefan, 2020. "Incorporating textual information in customer churn prediction models based on a convolutional neural network," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1563-1578.
    14. Hutchison, Paul D. & Daigle, Ronald J. & George, Benjamin, 2018. "Application of latent semantic analysis in AIS academic research," International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 83-96.
    15. Emad Mohamed & Sayed A. Mostafa, 2019. "Computing Happiness from Textual Data," Stats, MDPI, vol. 2(3), pages 1-24, July.
    16. Jake R. Nelson & Tony H. Grubesic, 2018. "Environmental Justice: A Panoptic Overview Using Scientometrics," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-18, March.
    17. Lüdering Jochen & Winker Peter, 2016. "Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 236(4), pages 483-515, August.
    18. Michel Zitt, 2015. "Meso-level retrieval: IR-bibliometrics interplay and hybrid citation-words methods in scientific fields delineation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(3), pages 2223-2245, March.
    19. Jonathan H. Ashtor, 2019. "Investigating Cohort Similarity as an Ex Ante Alternative to Patent Forward Citations," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 16(4), pages 848-880, December.
    20. Agha Mohammad Ali Kermani, Mehrdad & Fatemi Ardestani, Seyed Farshad & Aliahmadi, Alireza & Barzinpour, Farnaz, 2017. "A novel game theoretic approach for modeling competitive information diffusion in social networks with heterogeneous nodes," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 466(C), pages 570-582.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jftint:v:16:y:2023:i:1:p:3-:d:1305841. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.