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The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every facet of society. One of the non-pharmacological measures to contain the COVID-19 infection is social distancing. Federal, state, and local governments have placed multiple executive orders for human mobility reduction to slow down the spread of COVID-19. This paper uses geotagged tweets data to reveal the spatiotemporal human mobility patterns during this COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. With New York City open data, human mobility pattern changes were detected by different categories of land use, including residential, parks, transportation facilities, and workplaces. This study further compares human mobility patterns by land use types based on an open social media platform (Twitter) and the human mobility patterns revealed by Google Community Mobility Report cell phone location, indicating that in some applications, open-access social media data can generate similar results to private data. The results of this study can be further used for human mobility analysis and the battle against COVID-19.
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Walkie-Talkie Maps – A Novel Method to Conduct and Visualize Remote Ethnography
The COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions, and social distancing measures have made it difficult to observe, monitor, or manage urban life. To capture the experience of being in New York City during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a novel method of remote ethnography to interview people who were walking the city. We developed the Walkie-Talkie Map to collect and present these interviews, enabling website visitors to see what the subject saw as they walked the route of their choice. Visitors can interactively scroll through the interview and have access to additional visualizations and imagery that contextualize the main narrative. Visitors are thus able to vicariously experience what it was like to be in New York City at the outset of the COVID-19 epidemic. This work provides a case study on how to perform observational research when geographic and bodily distance has become the norm. We discuss the advantages and limitations of our method and conclude with its contributions to the study of cities and for others looking to conduct remote observational research in different fields of knowledge. The Walkie-Talkie maps can be found on this url: https://www.socialdistancing.tech.cornell.edu/what-is-a-walike-talkie
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- Award ID(s):
- 2028009
- PAR ID:
- 10539117
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Journal of Qualitative Methods
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Qualitative Methods
- Volume:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 1609-4069
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 160940692211155
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- remote ethnography walking interviews COVID-19 New York City geospatial mapping
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069221115519
