Katy Bennett

Events are the driving force behind social media, whether we try to create them or keep up with them. A wide range of studies has focused on how content from social media can be used to detect, model and predict events and identify key topics of discussion. At the same time, very limited attention has been given so far to the quantitative study of the everyday, which has fascinated qualitative human geography research in the past few decades. That is partly due to the lack of a formal definition of what constitutes the everyday. In this paper, we aim to advance our understanding of the everyday, not by reducing it to any kind of definition but by bringing it into view through a quantitative analysis. We hypothesise that the by-products of current methods focused on event detection might be used to quantitatively explore everyday geographies as represented through Twitter data. We consider the use of both statistical approaches based on term frequency and state-of-the-art large language models, and we conduct a case study on content posted on Twitter and geolocated in the city of Leicester. Our paper makes two key advances for research concerned with the everyday and the analysis of geographic information. First, we illustrate how large language models combined with spatial analysis and visualisation can foster the study of everyday geographies, providing an insight into the still elusive concept of the everyday, representing what other approaches to the everyday have struggled to qualify. Secondly, we showcase the potential held by large language models and visual analytics in democratising sophisticated natural language processing and thus providing new tools for research in human geography.

The way that virtual reality recreates space and environments on a variety of scales and situations, renders it of immediate interest to geographers interested in the relationship between people and their environments. In this methodological chapter, we demonstrate how VR mediates the methodological process of capturing affect. Reflecting on our experiences during the Mapping Multiculture project, the chapter reflects on VR as an immersive sensory experience, the processes of dislocation between virtual and physical, the physical challenges that arise, and how removing the researcher gaze shapes the research. We argue that VR offers tremendous opportunities for researchers interested in examining a range of geographic topics, not least the affectual and emotional underpinnings of the relationship between people and place.

As UK cities and towns become increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, researchers have tuned into how people inhabit multiculturalism. Ethnographic approaches have focused on the kind of togetherness that people generate as they go about their everyday lives, observing the affective textures of interactions and happenings of the here and now in granular detail. Missing from these accounts is what crowdsourced data might add to understandings of how multicultural places are experienced. What is vital about this kind of data is that it is ‘big’, involving a diversity of voices similarly intent on messaging their experiences, presenting opportunities to scale up the affect of encounters and to quantify what is difficult to qualify. This paper brings Digital Geographies into conversation with research on everyday multiculturalism to examine qualitatively and quantitatively how social media use folds into and expresses various practices of sociality and connection. Our paper involves Twitter, Nando’s and the city of Leicester in the UK to challenge and advance ways of understanding everyday multiculturalism in an era of global migration and ethnically complex populations.

In social research some places and populations are disproportionately targeted by researchers. While relatively little work exists on the concept of over-research those accounts that do exist tend to focus on participant-based research relationships and not place-based research relationships. Using interdisciplinary approaches and fieldwork experiences from a recently completed qualitative study of urban multiculture in England we develop the over-research debates in three key ways. First, the notion of ‘over-research’ carries negative connotations and we reflect on these as well as the possibility of more nuanced readings of research encounters. Second, we develop a more relational analysis, in which place – the London Borough of Hackney – is understood to be an animating force in the research process. Third, we argue that our experiences of the research provide evidence that many of the participants in the project were adept and confident in their engagements with the research process. In this way, the article suggests, disproportionate research attention may foster not research fatigue but a more knowing and co-productive research relationship.

This paper contributes to research on urban multiculture and debates as to how people routinely live and experience ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. This research takes an ‘unpanicked’ approach to multiculture that sits differently to, although not unaffected by, multiculturalism as policy objective and those debates around multiculturalism that variously celebrate cultural difference or construct it through crisis talk. Critical to this paper are the routine phenomenologies of multiculture and the everyday practices, competencies and skills of young people attending college. Because of their diverse intakes and the openness of young people to difference, colleges are key sites within which urban multiculture is experienced and through which it is defined. Based on participant observation, repeat in-depth discussion groups and interviews, the focus of this paper is young adults attending post-16 colleges and schools in three ethnically diverse urban locations. Colleges and schools are urban spaces that mediate sociality and student experience but are also woven into the wider urban setting in which they are placed. The paper explores the skills and competencies that young adults develop to negotiate college and we particularly focus on their use of jokes and the exercise of restraint to get along with others.

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.

Situating itself in encounter and public space debates and borrowing from non‐representational theory approaches, this paper uses data from the authors' 2‐year Economic and Social Research Council research project to consider how local urban parks can work as sites of routine encounter, mixity, and place belonging. The paper explores how parks as green public spaces are important as sites of inclusive openness while the materiality of parks is a key dynamic in affective encounter processes. Parks can work as animators of social interactions, participatory practices, and place affinities across ethnic and cultural difference. The paper concludes that the concept of convivial encounter can be extended to incorporate the concept of elective practices – choosing to be in shared public space can generate connective sensibilities that are not necessarily contingent on exchange. In using parks as a lens to examine localities and diversity, the paper critically reflects on research practices for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture and outlines how the project's research design and the fieldwork methods sought to carefully and appropriately undertake research with complexly different places and populations Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.