Content and Genres of City Image Development in Social Media: The City of Arkhangelsk

Official mass media are not the only source of city image development: social media do the same by engaging users in discussion and exchange of opinions. The image of the city in social media is a relatively new research object with a number of unresolved issues. This article defines the phenomenon of city image in social media and describes its linguistic features. The research involved a new automatic data collection tool: a web application that trawled social networks, messengers, official websites, and portals for reactions to the trigger word Arkhangelsk and its derivatives. The semantic, contextual, and genre analyses covered a manually selected data set (n = 2,237) for April-November 2023. The image of Arkhangelsk demonstrated a certain heterogeneity with a combination of official and unofficial images that differed in evaluation. However, the components could be structured as a content field with a reliable positive core (history, culture, nature), a relatively stable middle part (economy, finance), and a rapidly changing periphery (infrastructure, society). The social media texts belonged to a wide genre range. The analysis scheme can be applied to other territorial entities.