# Image of a City through Big Data Analytics: Colombo from the Lens of Geo-Coded Social Media Data
## 5 Discussion  
The image of a city is a cognitive representation of space that emerges from cognitive processes that strongly interact with the community's perceptions and observations of a city [68; 69; 70]. Mostly, city images were evaluated through small data using mental maps, walking tours, interviews, questionnaires, and sketch maps [71; 72]. Still, the study findings revealed that the use of social media data act as a promising data source to be used to examine city images in detail with more facts in this digital age.  
Supported by the descriptive analysis and the image processing exercise, this study conducted two main analyses--sentiment and popularity analyses. Although both analyses reflected the positive perceptions borne by the public, the temporal changes of the community's sentiments have changed significantly with the emergence of new landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts. For further discussion, the case study area was divided into three hypothetical zones (Figure 9)--Zones A, B, and C--to better understand the temporal changes of community sentiments.  
Figure 8: Sceneries of: (**a**) KH shared on Instagram; (**b**) MLB shared on Twitter.  
Figure 9: Temporal changes of the sentiment values by zones.  
Zone A consists of the highest number of Lynchian elements compared to Zone B and C each year. For instance, from 2015 to 2016, 45% (10 out of 22) of the total places identified were from Zone A. This number continuously and gradually increased from 2017 to 2018 to 48% (12 out of 24). Within the period of 2019-2020, the total Lynchian elements identified were 57% (16 out of 28). Especially, most of the highly perceived Landmarks, such as CF, GF, and PM, were in Zone A. Even the newly emerged Lynchian elements of ARC (Landmark), CCC (Landmark), and OGFB (Landmark) were from Zone A.  
Zone B has the second-highest number of Lynchian elements. Unlike Zone A, the number of Lynchian elements (n = 9) has not changed since 2015 in Zone B. Zone C has the lowest number of Lynchian elements (n = 9). Like Zone C, the number of Lynchian elements in Zone C have also not changed over time.  
Additionally, the popularity is agglomerate in this respected area. This can be identified as a major concern when considering the whole city's image. As of Figure 9, Zone A is enriched with many Lynchian elements--GF, CF, and KH, with an increasing number of tweets over the years. This reflected that the community has perceived such Lynchian elements with increasing popularity in a positive manner.  
This has created an agglomeration of Lynchian elements into Zone A, while other Zones remain unchanged in quantity. For better utilization, the city elements should be evenly distributed along the city and, hence, these 'Poles' must be avoided. The advantages of well-distributed Lynchian elements, especially with positive community perceptions, are much higher than proximity spatially concentrated Lynchian elements. Additionally, it can be observed that the city branding elements like 'Lotus Tower' are adding advantages to the city's popularity. To achieve an evenly distributed city image throughout the area, adding these branding elements can be an option to consider.  
For new forms of territorial governance, the objective of place branding is no more limited only to economic gains but also to the development of a positive image of the place that facilitates a sense of place and satisfies the potential desires and needs of the public [73]. In the purview of place branding, the socio-cultural and anthropological differences contribute to highlighting as well as promoting uniqueness as a tool for place branding [74]. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus amongst scholars that considers the objective of place branding in terms of linking place image to aspects of place identity and developing a sense of pride and belonging within the spatio-temporal global context [75; 76].