ABSTRACT
During the spring of 2020, COVID-19 limited contact between people and prevented from meeting and aggregating in real places. Many had to stay at home, and others spent time in quarantine facilities. In this context, virtual aggregation has increased at the expense of in-person aggregation. Expressive geo-tagging, namely the practice of creating locations with fictitious names to express an emotional condition, became worthy of attention. Grounded on anecdotal evidence, fictitious digital locations on social media such as 'Quarantine' began to proliferate, which, despite not having a name that could be traced back to an existing place, still carried geo-referenced information with them. Starting from this concept, we present the book Quaran.tiles, an archive of 364 expressive digital places collected from Instagram in April 2020 and enriched with information from Google Street View, which aims to give space and dimension to the resulting collection of fictitious and mingling user-generated places. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The spreading of geo-location technologies embedded in digital devices and their use on social media platforms has made many location-related data available, enabling the digital study of social phenomena. Due to the COVID-19 health emergency, the reality of lockdowns in many countries prevented people from meeting and aggregating in real places. Expressive geo-tags such as fictitious quarantine places sprung on Instagram as a means to create a new kind of aggregation. Design techniques and methodologies have proven to adequately translate available data sources into usable knowledge by visualising the data and information in moderately effective ways. Thus, by exploiting the Instagram platform's affordances, the paper proposes a data visualisation approach that gives dignity to the expressive quarantine locations and enables lay users to understand the observed phenomenon's thought, process, and implication. © 2021 ACM.