Full Article:

Tourist attractions play a major role in shaping ‘mental images’ of cities. The growing availability of urban big-data in recent years has opened up novel lines of inquiry into the nuances of urban imageability and sentiment. Drawing upon crowdsourced hybrid data in the form of both textual descriptions as well as photographs for 750 tourist attractions across Boston, Singapore and Sydney, this work compares the predominant themes of discussion and visual features of interest that shape tourist sentiment towards these cities. The study collects over 3500 user reviews and uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for the extraction of high-level topics of discussion. Object detection is also run on over 6000 photographs, and unsupervised clustering is carried out on extracted features to identify clusters of visual elements which capture tourist attention. The findings reinforce the popular identity of Boston as a city steeped in history, while strong perceptions of nature and greenery emerge from Singapore. Tourist interest in Sydney is dominated by specific anchors such as the Sydney Harbor Bridge.