Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash
TikTok-style videos shape how people imagine places and move through them. Importantly, on TikTok, these narratives are not simply creative expressions but are actively shaped and transformed through culturally mediated, platform-specific storytelling practices. A hashtag network (and its clusters) can be read as a public “map of attention,” showing both destinations and the values bundled with them, such as sustainability talk, housing aesthetics, self-optimization, or community care.
I start with TikTok’s central tag #digitalnomad and pull the hashtags that most frequently appear alongside it (the tags creators use in the same post). Using a “snowball” approach, I then expand outward: for each newly found tag, I also collect the tags that commonly co-occur with it. This creates a map of how people actually bundle ideas on TikTok—work style, identity, destinations, housing, and values—based on real posting behavior.
From there, I turn the data into a hashtag network graph: each hashtag is a node, and a connection (edge) means two hashtags repeatedly show up together. Clusters form naturally in this network because certain tags co-occur far more often with each other than with the rest: these clusters are what we interpret as “communities,” meaning recurring narratives and audiences, not just a list of popular tags.
Finally, I read those communities through a destination lens. When a destination tag (e.g., #Bali) sits inside a tight cluster with tags like #solotraveler, #coworking, #villalife, or #apartments, that cluster signals the dominant “story” people attach to that place—whether it’s solo travel, aspirational housing (“apartment tours”), sustainability/slow travel (“slowmad”), or cost-of-living talk.
Here, the graph is the tool that reveals which destination-centered subcultures exist.
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At the macro level, use the map to visualize the distinct narratives driving global mobility. The motivation for a nomad moving to the Global South often differs entirely from one moving within the Global North or to the “Global East.”
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At the meso level, the visualization reveals the formation of new hubs before they appear in mainstream travel guides. We “bridge” hashtags that connect established hubs (like Bali or Lisbon) to emerging ones (like Tirana or Medellín).
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At the micro level, the visualization tracks the “packaging” of lifestyle, possibly by entering into an “imaginary” of it, signaled by specific visual tropes on TikTok.
This is an ongoing project exploring how digital nomad “cultures” show up in mobility patterns. For now, consider this my sandbox, where I test methods, map emerging communities, and iterate on the story the data is starting to tell.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
