Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a network analysis based on text mining from blogs to reveal the process of urban land use and different districts of Seoul. The research is interesting, and the results demonstrate the potential of text mining approach of SNS data to further understand urban land use succession processes. There are however some issues that need to be fixed before paper acceptance

 

Major issues

1) The introduction is divided in three parts: a general explanation ( L28 – L63), a theoretical perspective (L 66-L122) and the study area (L124-L175). The general explanation is too short and leaves many information unexplained. For example, is there any reason for choosing this commercial hub? You mention the idiosyncratic identities (L.57) of neighborhood but what kind of identities were there. These are later explained in the third part related to the study area but it came quite late in the reading process. Putting the findings (L.61-63) in the introduction is not appropriate. I would suggest the rewriting of the section to better articulate the Literature Review section and general explanation so that the research questions and limitations of previous research are clearly stated. I would also put the brief History as a part of the methodology section.

2) The presentation of the words defining the Figure 2 are only described in the supporting information (Table S1).As these definitions are important to follow the result and discussion section, I would suggest introduce this table in the Methodology section

3) The people connection to SNS has evolved dramatically during the study period. How was the representativity of selected blogs ensured? And are blogs a good representation of social communication in Korea? The description of general blog is mainly described in the supporting information but the sentence “To do so, we take blogs with a search word, “Seoul,” as a reference region and suppose that the Seoul-related blogs are benchmarks of general cases that contain diverse contents rather than local, specialized blogs” is still unclear to me.

4) Is there any strong influential blog among those studied?

5) The discussion of the result suggests that the SNS exchange is at the source of the development of the retail areas. Would not it be the opposite? Retail areas are developed first, met a success on SNS which leads to further development of the retail areas. Disappointments of consumers expressed on SNS can precede the decline of the retail areas. This can be seen on the figure S1 in Hapjeong where the café shops booms in 2006-2007 (0.125 ->0.375) while the “café” word booms in 2007-2010, i.e. after the increase in café numbers. On the opposite, the decrease of the “café” word in Hongdae seems to decrease faster after 2010 than the number of café shops.

 

Minor issues

- L. 37 a ->The

- L. 38 understanding -> understand

- L.41-44 difficult to follow. “critical gap in the research” lets it sound it is your research that has a gap even though you may refer to previous works., et

- L 233: Ref[45] ->better use the name of the authors Lee K et al. [45].

- in S2 what about Cto? Still unclear about the reference blog

- Apearance -> Appearance in Figure S2

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

 

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic discussed in this study is very interesting and important.

The methodology is very useful to reach important conclusions on the topic.

The structure os the paper is adequate.

My overall opinion about this paper is very positive. In fact, I only have a (minor) suggestion - in my opinion, the discussion could be stronger, namely through a closer link with previous studies on related topics.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf