"Medicine is still against Black people": Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US

Funded by the British Academy, this report is part of a research project entitled “Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US”. The report investigates social, cultural, and political factors underlying vaccine hesitant beliefs and ideas among minoritised communities in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (US). The data is collected through interviews and focus groups with vaccine-hesitant individuals within various religiously, ethnically, and racially minoritised communities, interviews with medical practitioners, and through thematic analysis of vaccine communication in Twitter and Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic

Urban Activity Explorer: Visual Analytics and Planning Support Systems

Urban Activity Explorer is a new prototype for a planning support system that uses visual analytics to understand mobile social media data. Mobile social media data are growing at an astounding rate and have been studied from a variety of perspectives. Our system consists of linked visualizations that include temporal , spatial and topical data, and is well suited for exploring multiple scenarios. It allows a wide latitude for exploration, verification and knowledge generation as a central feature of the system. For this work, we used a database of approximately 1,000,000 geolocated tweets over a two-month period in Los Angeles. Urban Activity Explorer’s usage of visual analytic principles is uniquely suited to address the issues of inflexibility in data systems that led to planning support systems. We demonstrate that mobile social media can be a valuable and complementary source of information about the city