Exploring rural community place assessment through mobility and social media data in Fort Gaines, Georgia

Abstract

In community design efforts, the analysis of public stakeholders' perceptions and usage of community places can inform decisions affecting the built environment. However, accessing this information can be problematic, especially in rural areas where residents are mostly hard-to-reach groups. For the site analysis process for a rural town, this study implements mobile application data to explore visitation patterns and social media data to understand the perspectives of residents. Findings reveal the importance of particular community spaces which might have been overlooked through traditional approaches. The study shares how Big Data can be incorporated into site analysis to benefit underserved communities.

Utilizing Mobility Data to Investigate Seasonal Hourly Visiting Behavior for Downtown Parks in Dallas

“…The main methods for evaluating park usage are observational studies and surveys, which typically involve counting visitors at park entrances or distributing questionnaires to attendees [17][18][19]. However, these traditional approaches are labor-intensive and resourcedemanding and often susceptible to implicit biases in the sampling and data collection.…”

COVID-19 and campus users: A longitudinal and place-based study of university mobilities in Texas

“…Typical data collection methods for assessing campus activities include surveys and social media which are subject to high cost and data quality concerns ( Chen et al., 2020 ; Rasoulkhani & Mostafavi, 2018 ). This study utilizes innovative digital trace data from SafeGraph capturing visits to points-of-interest (POIs) ( Fernandez et al., 2023 ; Podesta et al., 2021 ). SafeGraph uses mobile phone records from 19 million users representing around 10% of devices in the US, and 8.8 million POIs are included in its data ( SafeGraph, 2022b ).…”