Economy
What Restaurant Reviews Reveal About Cities
Where official census data is sparse, MIT researchers find that restaurant review websites can offer similar demographic and economic information.
Online review sites can tell you a lot about a city’s restaurant scene, and they can reveal a lot about the city itself, too.
Researchers at MIT recently found that information about restaurants gathered from popular review sites can be used to uncover a number of socioeconomic factors of a neighborhood, including its employment rates and demographic profiles of the people who live, work, and travel there.