Together with Duncan Watts and others on the team at the CSSLab at Penn, and in conjunction with the city of Philadelphia, we built a collection of interactive data dashboards that visually summarize human mobility patterns over time and space for a number of cities, starting with Philadelphia, along with highlighting potentially relevant demographic correlates. The dashboards are available at covid.seas.upenn.edu.

The dashboards are built in Observable. The data are a proprietary combination of cell phone GPS data, demographic data derived from the American Community Survey, and COVID-19 caseload data from the New York Times.

A related piece of the same broader effort was the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) dataset, where a large team of student annotators tracked how local COVID-19 policy — mask mandates, business closures, gathering limits, and so on — changed in near-real-time across many jurisdictions. Policies shifted week to week, and there was no single authoritative source for what was actually in force where, which made modeling the pandemic’s trajectory much harder than it needed to be. With Benjamin Hurt, Madhav Marathe, Michael Bernstein, and many others, we released the resulting annotated dataset and the annotation workflow behind it Scientific Data.