The pandemic spread rapidly across Italy putting the region’s health system on the brink of collapse, highlighting the government’s capacity to respond to citizens. Ten dashboards provided an aggregated view of what people across Italy tweet during the pandemic by monitoring social media real-time behaviors across geographies.
This project performed two studies on 10 metropolitan cities of Italy in the north (Milan, Venice, Turin, & Bologna), center (Florence & Rome), south (Naples & Bari), and Islands (Palermo & Cagliari), and used machine learning techniques during Phase 0, I, II, and III (defined by the Italian goverment) of the pandemic during March 2020 to December 2020; (1) Sentiment analysis models on fear, anger, and joy were developed using over 4 million Covid-related Tweets. Findings showed an assortment of differences and connections across Twitter sentiments on policy measures, Covid cases/deaths, and geographies. (2) SMART geo-targeted search tools for Twitter messages were developed employing selected keywords to monitor the diffusion of information and social behavior changes during Covid-19. The dashboards (one per city) provide an automatic procedure to associate tweets based on geography differences, filter noises, remove redundant retweets, use machine learning methods to improve precisions, and analyze social media data from a spatial-temporal perspective.
Consortium
Dr. Gabriela Fernandez (Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Karenina Zaballa (MS Big Data Analytics and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Harrison Yang (MS Big Data Analytics and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Dr. Chanwoo Jin (Geography and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Rachelle De Ocampo (MS Public Health and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Wayne Kepner (MS Public Health and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou (Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, US), Dr. Brian H. Spitzberg (Communications and Metabolism of Cities Living Lab, USA), Carol Maione (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Dr. Filippo Bonora (University of Bologna and Crowdfight Covid-19, Italy), Dr. Shraddha Ghodke (University of College London and Crowdfight Covid-19, UK), Jack McKew (AECOM and Crowdfight Covid-19, Australia), Norbert Bonnici (Malta Critical Infrastructure Protection Directorate and Crowdfight Covid-19, Malta), and Dr. Jarai Carter (Columbia University, Smart Lab, Procter & Gamble and Crowdfight Covid-19, US). Special thanks to Crowdfight Covid-19.
English