Perceptions of Edinburgh

Capturing neighbourhood characteristics by clustering geoparsed local news

Our paper on “Perceptions of Edinburgh: Capturing neighbourhood characteristics by clustering geoparsed local news” is published here. This work is part of the AIM-CISC project on AI and multimorbidity, where our aim was to capture information about neighbourhoods and communities in local news. 

We collected Edinburgh Evening News accessed through University of Edinburgh Library for a timespan of 5 years and clustered them by neighbourhood into relevant topics.

We also visualised topics across time.

We used the Edinburgh Geoparser to georeference the news articles and determine which the most relevant neighbourhood for each article is. We also used the neighbourhoods of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation to link the news to.

As part of this work, we ran a public involvement and engagement event with members of the public who read local newspapers and have knowledge of the City of Edinburgh.

This work was made possible by combining different datasets, resources and cross-disciplinary expertise and is used for follow-on research identifying which characteristics of neighbourhoods increase vulnerability or promote resilience to ill health (Abubakar, E., et al., under review.).

Earlier this year, our team won the Centre for Data, Culture and Society award for the Best Novel Use of a Digital Method.

“This interdisciplinary project itself makes a strong contribution to understanding community health in Scotland, and the success of the methodology suggests a wider application of this framework to assessing community health via local news in other areas. I especially appreciate the researchers’ testing of their methods to confirm that the correlation they had uncovered was, indeed, reliable!”

The project was funded by NIHR’s AIM funding and is supported by the Advanced Care Research Centre.

Reference: Andreas Grivas, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Clare Llewellyn, Eleojo Oluwaseun Abubakar, Chunyu Zheng, Chris Dibben, Alan Marshall, Jamie Pearce, Beatrice Alex,Perceptions of Edinburgh: Capturing neighbourhood characteristics by clustering geoparsed local news, Information Processing & Management, Volume 62, Issue 1, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103910.