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Record W4384830785 · doi:10.1177/20539517231188724

Cities, COVID-19, and counting

2023· article· en· W4384830785 on OpenAlex
Tara Vinodrai, Shauna Brail

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueBig Data & Society · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicCOVID-19 epidemiological studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsPandemicData scienceData collectionCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)Big dataScale (ratio)Consistency (knowledge bases)Rigour2019-20 coronavirus outbreakSevere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)Political scienceRegional scienceGeographySociologyComputer scienceCartographySocial scienceData mining

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The COVID-19 pandemic had immediate and potentially long-lasting impacts on cities. Yet, the ability to assess, monitor, and analyze the wide-ranging effects of the pandemic has been stymied by data challenges. The pandemic elevated the need for, and reliance on, a wide range of data sources. We discuss four data challenges related to understanding the impact of the pandemic on cities. First, we explore how shifts in public policy and the decisions of private companies altered data collection priorities, availability, and reliability. Second, we discuss temporal dimensions, including the speed of data retrieval and frequency of data collection. Third, we identify the growing use of unexpected sources, which often feature a lack of rigor and consistency. Fourth, we explore the spatial scale of study and highlight questions about the interpretation of boundaries constituting the city. We use examples from the City of Toronto to ground our observations while also pointing to broader issues. We note that the tension between rapid, novel data and slow, consistent data continues to evolve and argue that a deeper appreciation and analysis of, and access to, myriad sources of data are necessary to understand the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on cities. Beyond the pandemic, our essay contributes to ongoing and emerging debates regarding the use of big data to understand the challenges facing cities and society.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.015
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.083
Threshold uncertainty score0.993

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.015
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.692
GPT teacher head0.483
Teacher spread0.210 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it