Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Measuring and Modeling Cultural Distance Between Countries and its Relationship with Migration Patterns

Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Sophie Lohmann, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with Fabrício Benevenuto, Pedro Olmo Stancioli Vaz de Melo (both: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Filipe Nunes Ribeiro (Federal University of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil)

The project develops methods to measure cultural distance across countries using digital trace and textual data. These measures are then incorporated into models of migration to improve predictions of migration flows and to better understand the relationship between culture and migration.  Detailed Description

A Measure of Cultural Similarity Across Countries Based on Facebook Users’ Interests in Food and Drinks

The plot shows our estimates of the asymmetric measure of cultural similarity between countries, based on Facebook users’ interests in food and drinks. Each cell corresponds to the index of similarity between the country in the row and the country in the column in terms of the number of Facebook users interested in each one of the top 50 foods and drinks preferred by the Facebook users living in the country in the row. © MPIDR; Source: COIMBRA VIEIRA, C.; LOHMANN, S.; ZAGHENI, E.; VAZ DE MELO, P. O. S.; BENEVENUTO, F.; RIBEIRO, F. N.: The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests. PLoS One 17:2, e0262947-e0262947 (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262947

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.:

The value of cultural similarity for predicting migration: evidence from food and drink interests in digital trace data

Population and Development Review 50:1, 149–176. (2024)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Ribeiro, F. N.:

The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests

PLOS One 17:2, e0262947–e0262947. (2022)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Ribeiro, F. N.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Zagheni, E.:

Using Facebook data to measure cultural distance between countries: the case of Brazilian cuisine

In: WWW '20: proceedings of the Web Conference 2020; Apr 20-25, 2020, Taipei, Taiwan, 3091–3097. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (2020)