This page has only limited features, please log in for full access.
Jessica Fernandez, Ph.D., is a Lecturer at the University of Georgia College of Environment and Design. Her research interests intersect people, place, and technology with a focus on emerging approaches to the design, planning, and analysis of the built environment.
Public space is essential to urban public life, activities, and events, and has become a key component of design and regeneration schemes. However, visitors’ experience of public space and the subsequent perceptions and sense of place are often difficult to measure because of its intangible nature and the expensive data collection process. This study collected 20,476 online reviews from 18,387 Tripadvisor users from 2008 to 2019 to understand how visitors experience and react to the public spaces on the Las Vegas Strip. We effectively elicited sense of place on the Las Vegas Strip and quantified the popularity and sentiment of each sense of place facet with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and logistic regression machine learning methods. The results specified 30 distinct topics related to the Strip, among which the most important ones were exploring different hotels, night scene, people watching, and walking long distances. The visitor experience explored within this study uncovered multiple facets of sense of place on the Strip and suggested urban design strategies and public space management policies related to the programmatic and physical elements of the Strip sidewalks. The study shows how online reviews can provide strong empirical evidence for visitor experience in built environment projects. This approach can be used by landscape architects, urban planners, and policy makers on post-occupancy evaluation and guide redevelopment efforts to provide a full feedback loop.
Yang Song; Runzi Wang; Jessica Fernandez; Dongying Li. Investigating sense of place of the Las Vegas Strip using online reviews and machine learning approaches. Landscape and Urban Planning 2020, 205, 103956 .
AMA StyleYang Song, Runzi Wang, Jessica Fernandez, Dongying Li. Investigating sense of place of the Las Vegas Strip using online reviews and machine learning approaches. Landscape and Urban Planning. 2020; 205 ():103956.
Chicago/Turabian StyleYang Song; Runzi Wang; Jessica Fernandez; Dongying Li. 2020. "Investigating sense of place of the Las Vegas Strip using online reviews and machine learning approaches." Landscape and Urban Planning 205, no. : 103956.
Urban public spaces are a key component to the well-being and prosperity of modern society. It has been increasingly important to improve the qualities and maximize the usages of urban public spaces. There is a lack of studies that investigate how people use and perceive urban parks using quantitative analysis of location-based social media reviews. This study tackles this gap by introducing a case study that uses social media reviews (Tripadivisor.com) to understand the perceived site quality and experiences of Bryant Park in New York City. A large dataset including 11,419 Tripadvisor reviews from 10,615 users was collected. LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), a natural language processing and machine learning technique, was used to perform topic modeling analysis that could reveal hidden themes in large amounts of text. The results include five semantic topics and their associated topic terms. A comprehensive overview of the user experiences in Bryant Park were provided along with their weekly and monthly dynamics. The findings provide insights for future public space designers and managers by revealing how users describe the designs and operations of Bryant Park.
Yang Song; Jessica Fernandez; Tong Wang. Understanding Perceived Site Qualities and Experiences of Urban Public Spaces: A Case Study of Social Media Reviews in Bryant Park, New York City. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8036 .
AMA StyleYang Song, Jessica Fernandez, Tong Wang. Understanding Perceived Site Qualities and Experiences of Urban Public Spaces: A Case Study of Social Media Reviews in Bryant Park, New York City. Sustainability. 2020; 12 (19):8036.
Chicago/Turabian StyleYang Song; Jessica Fernandez; Tong Wang. 2020. "Understanding Perceived Site Qualities and Experiences of Urban Public Spaces: A Case Study of Social Media Reviews in Bryant Park, New York City." Sustainability 12, no. 19: 8036.