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A Data Driven Approach to Study the Social and Political Statuses of Urban Communities in Kunming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2020

Charles Chang Open the ORCID record for Charles Chang [Opens in a new window]
Charles Chang*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: charles.chang@yale.edu
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Abstract

This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to address and even answer questions of a socio-political, economic and, indeed, humanistic nature. My method can also be applied to other Chinese cities and to cities elsewhere that lack accurate information.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: Digital Humanities , July 2020 , pp. 461 - 481
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

I thank Zhiwei Ye for his ever-awesome help! An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 annual meeting of American Association of Geographers, Stanford University, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Yale University. I thank the conference and workshop participants for their useful comments.

References

1 Scientists have been developing new measurements using “big data.” I list four examples here: Chang, Charles, Ye, Zhiwei, Huang, Qunying, and Wang, Caixia. “An Integrative Method for Mapping Urban Land Use Change Using Geo-Sensor Data,” in Proceedings of the 1st International ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics (New York: ACM, 2015), 47–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hu, Tengyun, Yang, Jun, Li, Xuecao, and Gong, Peng. “Mapping Urban Land Use by Using Landsat Images and Open Social Data.” Remote Sensing 8.2 (2016), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zhang, Yuan, Li, Qiangzi, Huang, Huiping, Wu, Wei, Du, Xin, and Wang., Hongyan “The Combined Use of Remote Sensing and Social Sensing Data in Fine-Grained Urban Land Use Mapping: A Case Study in Beijing, China.” Remote Sensing 9 (2017), 865CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Liu, Xiaoping, He, Jialv, Yao, Yao, Zhang, Jinbao, Liang, Haolin, Wang, Huan, and Hong, Ye. “Classifying Urban Land Use by Integrating Remote Sensing and Social Media Data.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31.8 (2017), 1675–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Spence, Jonathan D, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 457Google Scholar.

3 Kunming Statistical Bureau and Kunming team of National Bureau of Statistics 昆明市统计局;国家统计局昆明调查队, Kunming Statistical Yearbook 昆明统计年鉴 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

4 Chen, Xi, “State-Generated Data and Contentious Politics in China,” in Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies, edited by Carlson, Allen et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 By digitization, I mean both converting printed materials, including paper maps, into machine-readable formats and re-structuring information from raw data, for example, converting satellite images to spatial information and geocoded textual addresses into geographical coordinates. For my purpose, computation is using machine learning or other computational algorithms to predict information based on data and verification is ground-truthing the accuracy of the prediction from computation

6 Due to cloud coverage or technical difficulties such as the Scan Line Corrector (SLC) failure, sometimes the temporal interval is longer.

7 Xu, Jintao, Ran, Tao, Zhigang, Xu, and Bennett, Michael T, “China's Sloping Land Conversion Program: Does Expansion Equal Success?,” Land Economics, 86 (2010), 219–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Google, “A New Approach to China,” published on January 12, 2010, https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

9 An example of coordinate correction algorithm in Python is retrieved from one of many programs made by geoscientists. I modified it slightly and put it on the Github repository for this article (accessible at https://github.com/placeasmedia/kunming_urban_communities). Only OpenStreetMap is not subject to the geographical offsets that the government requires but it has significantly fewer POIs than other map providers.

10 Steven Millward, “Tencent Hits the Road (and Goes off the Beaten Path) to Create China's Biggest ‘Street View’,” Tech in Asia, January 3, 2014, www.techinasia.com/tencent-maps-covers-china-street-view.

11 Tencent, “POI Classification Keywords of Tencent Maps” 腾讯地图 POI 分类关键词, https://lbs.qq.com/webservice_v1/guide-appendix.html, 2014, accessed on June 21, 2019.

12 Potere, David, “Horizontal Positional Accuracy of Google Earth's High-Resolution Imagery Archive,” Sensors 8 (2008), 7973–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

13 According to CNNIC, the number of users is more than 200 million nationwide. Given the percentage of users who use Weibo and the percentage of users who use geotag, the estimated number of users in Kunming should be 200,000. The observed sample is 270,000, close to the estimate.

14 Zandbergen, Paul A and Barbeau, Sean J, “Positional Accuracy of Assisted GPS Data from High-Sensitivity GPS-Enabled Mobile Phones,” The Journal of Navigation 64 (2011), 381–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 The collection and aggregated analysis of Weibo geotagged posts is approved by the IRB at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

16 Prices of mobile devices were collected on May 21, 2014.

17 The typology from a government copy can be found at “Urban Land Classification and Land Use Planning Standards” (城市用地分类与规划建设用地标准 Chengshi yongdi fenlei yu guihua jianshe yongdi biaozhun), www.mohurd.gov.cn/zqyj/201805/W020180522042539.doc, accessed on June 21, 2019.

18 Zhang, Li, In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 109–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Some scholars call this kind of community a communal apartment block. In this article, I use that term to describe the architectural style of apartment buildings, rather than a type of social institution. The architecture for all the communal apartments in a block is often similar and utilitarian. An individual household often occupies an apartment while multiple households share the corridors or some common spaces

20 Note that computer scientists often refer to scalability as a modular design by distributing the computation across small scalable components concurrently, which is an entirely different concept from what I propose.

21 Reischauer, Edwin Oldfather, Ennin's Travels in T'ang China (New York: Ronald Pr., 1955), 138Google Scholar.

22 Arnott, Peter D., An Introduction to the French Theatre (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977)Google Scholar.

23 Nightingale, Andrea W., “The Philosopher at the Festival: Plato's Transformation of Traditional Theōria,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, edited by Elsner, Jaś and Rutherford, Ian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 151–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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