Harnessing Geosocial Media Data for CoVID-19 Pandemic
Governments around the world have responded the CoVID-19 pandemic with an unprecedented suite of measures aimed at containing the spread of virus. Some of these measures, e.g., social distancing, may lead to stress, anxiety, depression or panic, resulting different individual behaviors and changing individual’s attitude, which are crucial to the effect of these measures. On the other hand, statistics show that some of these measures have helped in flattening the curve and informing the public, for examples. In response, the team at Ryerson GeoCollaboration and GIS Lab has joined other researchers to explore the power of geosocial media data, integrated with other big datasets, in combating the spread of the virus by studying the human behaviors under CoVID-19, assess the effect of social countermeasures on containing CoVID-19 and develop digital disease surveillance tools for contact tracing.
Help us to better understand the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on human behaviors by completing this online survey (external link, opens in new window) .
Spatio-temporal distribution characteristics and patterns of social media posts (e.g., tweets) and CoVID-19 cases can help correlate people's attitude towards social countermeasures with the "degree of infection", assess the effectiveness of these measures and identify interesting distinct patterns. Geosocial media posts, if filtered by keywords (w.r.t the concerns of the public or specific measures) may also provide new insights on social countermeasures.
Pandemics such as CoVID-19 may lead to stress, anxiety, depression or panic, resulting different individual behaviors and changing individual’s attitude, in addition to affecting people's health and wellbeing as well as our health systems. We aim at:
- Gauge public opinion or attitude towards social distancing
- Correlate attitude with the degree of infection
Survey for Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Human Behavior
We kindly invite you to take 5 minutes to participate in this online survey, helping us to quickly collect data for our study on understanding the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on human behavior, which aims to help everyone in the world get through this global crisis by advocating better policies to governors.
Given recent debates on using phone location data for contact tracing around the world, methods and tools using alternative data sources such as geosocial media data are needed to help detect people's gathering and violation of self-isolation measures, monitor people’s movements and warn them of any contact with COVID-19 positive patients, etc. Here we aim at developing tools that can detect gathering events and casual congregating in real time using geosocial media data together with other ancillary data.