Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Emergence Of Covid-19 And Patterns Of Early Transmission In An Appalachian Sub-Region, Abbey K. Mann, Timothy A. Joyner, Ingrid E. Luffman, Megan Quinn, William Tollefson, Ashley Frazier

Journal of Appalachian Health

Background: In mid-March 2020, very few cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the Central Blue Ridge Region, an area in Appalachia that includes 47 jurisdictions across northeast Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwest Virginia. Authors described the emergence of cases and outbreaks in the region between March 18 and June 11, 2020.

Methods: Data were collected from the health department websites of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia beginning in mid-March for an ongoing set of COVID-19 monitoring projects, including a newsletter for local healthcare providers and a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) dashboard. In Fall 2020, using these databases, authors …

The Use Of Distraction: Doomscrolling, Losing Time, And Digital Well-Being In Pandemic Space-Times, Jacob Saindon

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the space-times of the COVID-19 global health crisis, how have our relationships with smartphones changed? How do popular discourses designate mundane engagements with digital technologies as healthy or unhealthy, and how are these notions of wellness practiced? This thesis draws upon an online survey of smartphone users residing in Kentucky, and a review of marketing, journalistic, and academic literature to establish current understandings of ‘digital well-being’. The paper then analyzes interviews with Kentucky smartphone users who were asked to track their screen time for a one-week period. This project reveals normative conceptions of well-being and the role of smartphone …

Viral Data, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Matthew Zook

Geography Faculty Publications

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals …

Covid-19 Is Spatial: Ensuring That Mobile Big Data Is Used For Social Good, Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook, Tuuli Toivonen

Geography Faculty Publications

The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic. The avalanche of mobile Big Data makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. However, the current crisis also highlights serious limitations in the readiness to take the advantage of mobile Big Data for social good, both within and beyond the interests of health sector. We propose …