Expressive digital place making as means of aggregation: a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic

The spreading of geo-location technologies embedded in digital devices and their use on social media platforms has made many location-related data available, enabling the digital study of social phenomena. Due to the COVID-19 health emergency, the reality of lockdowns in many countries prevented people from meeting and aggregating in real places. Expressive geo-tags such as fictitious quarantine places sprung on Instagram as a means to create a new kind of aggregation. Design techniques and methodologies have proven to adequately translate available data sources into usable knowledge by visualising the data and information in moderately effective ways. Thus, by exploiting the Instagram platform’s affordances, the paper proposes a data visualisation approach that gives dignity to the expressive quarantine locations and enables lay users to understand the observed phenomenon’s thought, process, and implication.