Keith Burghardt, Johannes H.Uhl, Kristina Lerman, Stefan Leyk
Road networks represent a key component of human settlements, such as cities, towns, and villages, that mediate pollution and congestion, as well as economic development. However, little is known about the long-term development trajectories of road networks in rural and urban settings. We leverage novel spatial data sources to reconstruct and analyze road networks in more than 850 US cities and over 2500 US counties since 1900. Our analysis reveals significant variations in the structure of roads both within cities and across the conterminous US. Despite differences in the evolution of these networks, there are commonalities and strong geographic patterns. These results persist across the rural-urban continuum and are therefore not just a product of accelerated urban growth. These findings refine and extend existing knowledge and illuminate the need for policies for urban and rural planning including the critical assessment of new development trends.
Cite as: K. Burghardt, J. H. Uhl, K. Lerman, & S. Leyk. (2022). Road network evolution in the urban and rural United States since 1900. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 95: 101803.
Keith Burghardt, Johannes H. Uhl, Kristina Lerman, Stefan Leyk
The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the United States. Opinion surveys identified the importance of political ideology in shaping perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures. The aim of this study was to measure political partisanship and antiscience attitudes in the discussions about the pandemic on social media, as well as their geographic and temporal distributions. We analyzed a large set of tweets from Twitter related to the pandemic, collected between January and May 2020, and developed methods to classify the ideological alignment of users along the moderacy (hardline vs moderate), political (liberal vs conservative), and science (antiscience vs proscience) dimensions. We found a significant correlation in polarized views along the science and political dimensions. Moreover, politically moderate users were more aligned with proscience views, while hardline users were more aligned with antiscience views. Contrary to expectations, we did not find that polarization grew over time; instead, we saw increasing activity by moderate proscience users. We also show that antiscience conservatives in the United States tended to tweet from the southern and northwestern states, while antiscience moderates tended to tweet from the western states. The proportion of antiscience conservatives was found to correlate with COVID-19 cases. Our findings shed light on the multidimensional nature of polarization and the feasibility of tracking polarized opinions about the pandemic across time and space through social media data.
Cite as: K. Burghardt, J. H. Uhl, K. Lerman, & S. Leyk. (2022). City definition affects long-term urban scaling analyses in the United States (1900-2015). arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.10852.