For someone who lives in New York City and is considering their options, two possibilities are heading east to Long Island, and heading north to Westchester. How might you get a feel for those communities without living or visiting there? Is there a way to hear what the locals talk about?
One idea is to listen to conversations locals are having to see what's topical in each place. Using "hot" posts from subreddits for Westchester and Long Island as a proxy for those conversations, and we can find the 5 most prevalent "topics" for each subreddit and the 20 most probable words for each topic.
Using the PRAW library in python, get the ~150 hottest submissions and all associated comments, filtering by minimum score of 1 to hopefully avoid spam. For each submission, Concatenate the text, comments, and replies into a single document, and use the documents for topic modeling as described here.
For each location, the topics and their most probable words are displayed below:
There's some topic overlap from these posts, including conversations about power, cable providers, and schools. But it's not clear whether the words used in association with those terms is evidence of a different sentiment in the communities about the issues.