Smart cities depictions in wikipedia articles: Reflections from a text analysis approach

Discussions about smart cities continue to attract much attention from researchers, practitioners and citizens at large. As the literature continues to grow the number of indicators and frameworks for “smartness” are becoming more robust and perspectives on what makes a city smart continue to evolve. This exploratory research analyzes text from 51 Wikipedia articles that describe cities considered “smart” according to three globally recognized and independent rankings of cities. By comparing findings on word frequencies and word associations found in Wikipedia articles with terminology found in academic literature on smart cities, this study intends to determine to what extent data about smart cities produced through Wikipedia's crowdsourcing approach relates to theoretical developments in the field. This inductive approach may open avenues to the application of automated text analysis methods in theorizing and empirical efforts with information produced about smart cities. This exploratory work may facilitate conceptual understanding of the properties and features of smart cities and may also open avenues to future applications of alternative conceptualization methods.