Streams of public data flowing and extractable from social media platforms have an informative potential still not entirely coded. However, it is already clear that analysis of contents shared on social media platforms by users of a city or a cultural site offer significant information to map social practices and city users flows. Standing on these data, we can read the local and non-local relevance of cultural institutions and sites in a city, identify drivers and pivots able to boost and lead a process of cultural innovation and urban internationalization. Digital Research based on the method we shortly present in this paper makes possible to reconstruct social trends and communities thanks to a real or almost real time ethnographic tool box. The social media platforms have much more to offer to cultural and city managers than an arena for emarketer and social media experts to upload storytelling pieces. The incredible amount of data shared everyday by all of us, when we cross cities and share our tourist and cultural experiences, come before web marketing. Therefore they can be considered as a valuable and not easily replaceable source of research and knowledge to better understand the current and future public of museums, cities visitors and culture users.
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