From Static Coordinates to Dynamic Scenes: Digital Visibility and Spatial Organization of Urban Folk Cultural Spaces in Tianjin

Abstract

Urban folk cultural spaces are increasingly shaped by everyday practices, periodic events, tourism activities, and digital media. This study examines how urban folk culture in Tianjin can be understood as dynamic scenes of spatiotemporal activation and digital visibility rather than static mapped locations. Based on 6682 cleaned geotagged Weibo records, the study combines GIS-based spatial analysis, temporal analysis, ST-DBSCAN spatiotemporal clustering, high-frequency word analysis, and NLP sentiment classification, supplemented by field observations and contextual materials. The results show that folk-related digital traces are concentrated in Tianjin’s historical core and major cultural and riverfront areas, while different folk-cultural categories display distinct spatial coverage and digital visibility. Relationships among spatiotemporal clusters, interpreted together with contextual evidence, reveal three recurrent spatial organization patterns: route-linked, processional, and dispersed multi-node structures. These patterns reflect connected corridors, event-driven sequential activation, and recurrent independent nodes rather than corresponding directly to folk-cultural categories. Public evaluation further indicates that high digital visibility does not necessarily correspond to uniformly positive experience. The study provides an analytical approach that connects mapped cultural locations with their temporal activation, spatial relationships, and public evaluation.