Citizen Analytics: Statistical Tools for Studying Multicultural Environments and Distributed Cognition on Social Media

摘要

People of all cultures depended largely on the mainstream media to report the details and the progress of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Such reports caused anxiety, depression, and helplessness. I attribute these negative attitudes partly to the lack of ability in citizens to self-analyze the current and the projected state of the virus, both locally and globally. This paper explores the research question: What skills do citizens need to self-analyze the current and projected state of a pandemic, and to report their analyses to the public? I use a data ethnography of my experience analyzing the JHU CSSE Data repository to report on five categories of key analytic skills: preparation, visualization, comparison, prediction, and socialization along with the details of their code implementation.