ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book’s empirical focus. To understand the way space is embedded in social media issue publics, four contrasting case studies are set up. The issues of housing markets and cycling infrastructure in the cities of Berlin and Frankfurt, Germany, represent contentious political debates on social media, and particularly on Twitter. They vary according to the extent of residential segregation in the cities and the relevance of social stratification for the policy issue. All cases have seen substantial mobilization and policymaking efforts in recent years. Issue spaces are characterized predominantly through the application of a computational social science framework. It uses custom gazetteers to capture references to places in over a million Twitter messages. Further analytical steps rely on a combination of topic modeling and qualitative content analysis, semantic network analysis, and the analysis of retweeting patterns. Maps provide a central analytical approach to understanding the patterns of the issue spaces.
