Social Response to COVID-19 SMART Dashboard: Proposal for Case Study

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the world’s healthcare infrastructure as well as its social, economic, and psychological well-being. In particular, Italy’s unexpectedly high COVID-19 case and death rate from March to June, 2020, captured headlines due to its speed and virulence. Many governments are currently implementing measures to help contain and slow down the spread of COVID-19. The Social Response to Covid-19 Smart Dashboard was built by researchers at the Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age at San Diego State University and Politecnico di Milano. This dashboard provides an aggregated view of what people in 10 Italian metropolitan cities (Milan, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Bari, Palermo, and Cagliari) tweet during the pandemic by monitoring social media behaviors in the north, center, south, and islands. Moreover, the dashboard is a geo-targeted search tool for Twitter messages to monitor the diffusion of information and social behavior changes which provides an automatic procedure to help researchers to associate tweets based on geography differences, filter noises such as removing redundant retweets and using machine learning methods to improve precisions, analyze social media data from a spatiotemporal perspective, and visualize social media data in various aspects such as weekly trends, top urls, top retweets, top mentions, and top hashtags. The Social Response to Covid-19 SMART Dashboard provides a useful tool for policy makers, city planners, research organizations, and health officials to monitor real-time societal perceptions using social media. © 2022, The Author(s).