# Image of a City through Big Data Analytics: Colombo from the Lens of Geo-Coded Social Media Data
## 1 Introduction  
Cities are ever-changing environments with new urban elements being introduced into the built environment on a regular basis. In his seminal book 'Image of the City', [PERSON] [1] introduced how the city images can be conveniently understood through the five 'Lynchian' elements--i.e., landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts. Moreover, people's experiences and perceptions about a city are also influenced by the image of the city. An image of a city provides the community with an orientation, direction, and emotional security about the city. Moreover, a poor city image, which is non-discernible by the above five elements and design, leads to psychologically unsatisfying urban environments for the people living and visiting a city [1]. A good city image has an influence on the shaping up of an overall city identity as well as people's place-based identities [2]. The image of the city is not only a critical factor having an impact socially on the local community, but it plays a significant role in boosting a country's economy by contributing to their branding, promoting tourism, and in staying competitive for attracting investors [3]. While a good city image positively impacts attractiveness, a poor city image, on the other hand, leads to many negative impacts, such as limited investment attractiveness, absence of prospects for the future, and so on [4]. In the age of globalization, a city's image is a mix of physical and social values, as well as a tool for branding where cities are competing to identify and establish their unique identities as their competitive edge [5, 6, 7]. Henceforth, in their attempts to create and maintain a good city image to achieve the highest expectations of the citizens and economy, contemporary cities are increasingly investing in better and more efficient ways to examine city images as an important tool to understand the changing perceptions of the citizens [8; 9]. In recent years, a new dimension has been added to the attempts of discerning the idea of an image of the city with the breakneck speed of growth seen in the use of social media [10]. Social media can be identified as one of the main and largest data sources in the modern era and, more importantly, a potential platform to examine city images accurately within shorter time periods [11]. It holds millions of textures and graphical data related to every kind of topic. Most importantly, social media data is regarded as crowd-sourced, which is collected from the public [11]. Furthermore, social media data collection methods are timesaving, cost-effective, and a much more suitable method to avoid physical contact with the public in this COVID-19 pandemic situation [12]. A huge amount of data is available on social media to capture public opinion, and many big data analysis tools and algorithms are available to analyze them further. For instance, there are over two billion active social media users in the Asia-Pacific region, and it records the world's highest number of social network users. For example, in November 2022, as an Asian country, 76% of Sri Lankans used Facebook, 13% used YouTube, 5% used Pinterest, 2% used Instagram, and another 2% used Twitter [13]. People use aforesaid social media networks to share their thoughts, feelings, and observations within their network. Such information shared in social networks can be considered good reflections about landmarks (e.g., towers, museums), nodes (e.g., urban squares, train stations), edges (e.g., waterfronts, lakes), paths (e.g., nature trials, streets), districts (e.g., villages, neighborhoods), and their experiences attached to them. This opens a novel research direction and a tool for scholars to investigate the image of a city by analyzing social media content. The crowdsourced social media data can be regarded as one of the strongest potential platforms to examine city images accurately within shorter time periods.