Can we Observe the Antagonism of These Two Communities from a Geographical Perspective?

Where do Journalists and Bloggers go?

 

Why is it important to ask this question?

The reception capacity of a theatre, its subsidies, its location but also its popularity affect the selection of plays which will be performed in one theatre. The Royal Court Theatre for instance does not produce the same playwrights as the small theaters located in the suburbs of London. Mapping where the journalists and the bloggers go is then another way to look at the kind of cultural discourse both these communities build.

Which Computational Tools shall we Use?

To visualise journalists and bloggers’ journeys through London, the first step consisted in retrieving automatically the latitude and the longitude of each of the performance venues mentioned in the corpus. We had then to replace these references on an online map using the programming language Python.

Which Conclusions can we Draw so Far?

These results prove that the gap between the canon of London theatre criticism and its peripheries is very significant from a geographical point of view. Unlike journalistic criticism, the points representing digital criticism are not only concentrated in central London, but also in its margins. The number of theaters diverges considerably from one corpus to another. While there are 210 different theaters in corpus I, there are twice as many in the second corpus (446 theatres). Bloggers therefore tend to go to smaller theaters that are less known to the general public. We can assume that these places offer other types of theatrical and tend to praise marginal voices.

 

Perhaps even more striking is the type of places to which critics of these two communities go. I have classified these 446 places into 24 different categories: theaters of course, but also pubs, academic or cultural institutions, concert halls… What is interesting is that bloggers and journalists don’t attend the same type of places. Religious places, for instance, are absent from the places visited by bloggers while they are the most frequented places by journalists. On the contrary, places like museums, art associations and bowling alleys are successful among the digital community. Different from the theatrical institutions, we can guess that these places offer a wider variety of show. This map and this classification thus make it possible to deduce that bloggers seem to cover a wider field of theaters, and honor a more diversified culture.

Explore these two communities trough the places bloggers and journalists visit !