Talks

It is known that urban form and function are closely related. Beyond this, in a new study, we present empirical proof revealing how urban form and function are associated with urban discourse. In our new publication titled “Are urban form and function related to urban discourse? Insights from remote sensing and social media data for 15 major cities across the globe“, topic modeling was used to identify topics discussed in these cities using multilingual geolocated Twitter data. The remote sensing-based Local Climate Zones classification was used to represent urban form, and these datasets were integrated within a unified analytical framework. This research was a joint undertaking by researchers from our Geolingual Studies Team, the Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC), and the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Würzburg, as well as Yale University in New Haven, USA, and the Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The GLS team has published a new study in Corpus-based Studies across Humanities on "Integrating corpus linguistics and NLP methods to explore social media discourse from Edinburgh and London" that investigates the spatiality of topics and interpretability of polarity in tweets from posted from two urban areas.

On 26 March 2026, MSc student Angie Torres Lopez successfully defended her Master’s thesis titled “Assessing the accessibility improvements, public perception and potential beneficiaries of cable car systems in Mexico City and Medellin”, supervised by our team members Prof. Hannes Taubenböck and Dr. Richard Lemoine-Rodríguez.

As part of the recent Springer Nature book on "Recent Developments in Geospatial Information Sciences", the Geolingual Studies team has published a chapter entitled: "Can Social Media Data Help to Understand the Socio-spatial Heterogeneity of the Interests and Concerns of Urban Citizens? A Twitter Data Assessment for Mexico City".