A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of
new connections and communities in a COVID world.
Quarantine re-makes the city around us, re-defining “inside”
and “outside,” “home” and “neighborhood.”
“Staying home” means complying with a socially and politically
constructed bubble that delimits not only who or what can move from one side or
another, but the protocols to be followed when that barrier is breached. Moreover, transitioning from one to another
is not just a matter of spatial movement, it also involves a shift in identity,
from the one quarantined to the one not quarantined. Finally, quarantine is a temporal state: fourteen
days, or until the city lifts the quarantine measures. Under these conditions, what does “home”
mean? What does “inside” mean? And when one is quarantined, what do more
collective identities like “community” and “neighborhood” mean? Under these circumstances, “home” can have a
negative valence—it can be isolating and alienating from the people around
you. On the other hand, “home” can be a
source of new realizations of self, and new formed of connectedness and solidarity. In this project, I utilize a large set of Twitter
data gathering thoughts on quarantine from different countries at different
times, from March to September. Mostly
urban, the tweets originate in cities undergoing quarantine from around the
world: Seoul, Paris, New York, each instituting different quarantine protocols
at different times. Using sentiment
analysis and textual analysis, I examine Twitter as 1) a source of positive and
negative valuations of quarantine; and 2) as a record of activities and
relationships forged under quarantine. On
the one hand, preliminary results would seem to validate dire predictions from
Durkheim, Simmel and others with regards to alienation in the city. And, indeed, many people use Twitter to
bemoan their isolation and their truncated lives. On the other, many Twitter users explore the
possibility of new connections with self and with community amidst physical
separation. In this, quarantine’s
temporality plays an importance role by allowing people to construct visions of
community and togetherness as a future temporality. This paper explores the possibilities for
building urban community in a pandemic world through an exploration of the way
“home” and “neighborhood” have been re-conceptualized. Ultimately, what comes from this research are
insights into being together while being apart, and “home” as a staging area
for the construction of community. The
essay ends with hopeful speculations on a post-pandemic city that retains communal
solidarity while maintaining distancing.
