Fourteen quick tips for crowdsourcing geographically linked data for public health advocacy
Fig 2
Workflow used by COVID Schools Canada (CSC) to crowdsource COVID-19 cases and outbreaks data across Canadian schools.
Data were collected using a combination of automated web scrapers (Tip 8), manual spreadsheet entry from a combination of school board and province-level websites (Tips 6 and 7), and from a Google form on the CSC website for individual reports (Tip 9). Custom R code was used to pull data from these varied sources, clean the data, and assign latitude/longitude coordinates to each school entry (Tip 10). The final CSV file was converted to GeoJSON format and pushed to GitHub. Mapbox was used to create the interactive map and automatically refreshed its view from the file on GitHub (Tip 13). Table 2 lists all major software packages used for building the pipeline. Map generated using MapBox (https://www.mapbox.com/).