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Do Northerners talk more than Southerners?

There is a common stereotype that people in the North of England talk more than those in the South. The perception is, that folk living north of some, indeterminate line that separates north from south, are friendlier than their southern counterparts and hence end up talking more. Of course there are many contradictory elements, such as the taciturn northern farmer or the chatty London cabby. But for many this idea has held firm over many generations supported by countless anecdotal comments. The notion is not unique to England and probably replicated in other countries as well as between regional divisions within many countries. The scientific question is whether we can substantiate such claims.

Does Twitter hint at an answer?

Motivated by the availability of new data and the possibility of observing a North v South divide a team, led by UCL's Professor Steven Bishop, compared the length of conversational tweets (replies) messages posted from various geographical groupings in the UK.

The stereotype that people from Northern England talk more than those from Southern England is not observed on Twitter, an analysis of the length of Twitter messages has revealed.

In a large scale, BIG DATA, study, which counted over more than 3 million tweets posted over three years, a north-south divide was not observed.

For some geographical groups the median lengths did differ - by as much as 2 characters - which seems small but, when counted over this large data set, the difference is significant.

Instead of a divide between North and South, the study showed that a division grouping the Midlands with Scotland, compared to the rest of UK is visible.

The messages were also grouped by latitude.

UCL research associate and lead author Dr. Christian Alis, describes the study as exemplifying the "potential of big data" to test long-held beliefs but warns that "further studies are clearly needed in conjunction with other social science studies."

The complete study appears on the open access journal PLOS ONE [paper][data].

Computational Social Science Conference, 11-13 June 2014

Follow us at the computational social science conference (web: http://compsocsci.eu/, twitter: #CompSocSci), where Daniele Barchiesi and Christian Alis will present recent research on using big data to monitor large-scale social patterns.

Quantifying mobility using Flickr data

Flickr is one of the world's largest photo sharing websites, with a reported 92 million users who share more than 1 million pictures per day. A growing number of users upload their pictures using smartphones or other GPS-enabled devices that automatically assign to each photo a time-stamp and a pair of geographical coordinates indicating where and when the image has been taken. The resulting geographical time series that describe people's trajectories in time and space are a rich source of information that can be used to infer patterns of human mobility and behaviour.

Our current research focuses on quantifying bilateral migration patterns between countries using Flickr users' trajectories. We will also present preliminary results aimed at investigating mobility on a smaller spatial scale: by extending work on the statistical distribution of individuals' movements, we plan to model underlying contexts that cause the emergence of such mobility patterns.

Dynamics of Conversational Utterances

Conversations transfer short bits of information and the speech in each turn is called an utterance. Using conversations in works of fiction and in the online social medium Twitter, we found that the utterance length of conversations is getting shorter with time but adapts more strongly to the constraints of the communication medium. Regional variations of utterance lengths in the US suggest that the lengths are not directly influenced by location but by a demographic variable. Similar results were also found for the UK and Italy, which contradicts the popular notion that there is a North-South divide with respect to talkativeness in these countries. Although not definitive, our use of novel sources of conversations has given us a tantalising look into the dynamics of human conversations.