Understanding Human Mobility Patterns

In the line of Bruno Latour’s thoughts on the consequences of digital traces on social sciences, the current issue of Nature reports in its editorial “A flood of hard data” on the use of mobile-phone technique as an example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the ‘hard’ sciences:

Social scientists have long struggled with a paucity of hard data about human activities; people’s self-reporting about their social interactions, say, or their movement patterns is labour-intensive to collect and notoriously unreliable. In this case, the researchers obtained objective data on individuals’ movements from mobile-phone networks (albeit without access to any individual’s identity, for privacy reasons).

In “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns“, a paper featured in the same issue is an example of this new approach. It reports on the study of movements of 100,000 people following their cellphone signals and found. Quite predictably, it reveals that “most people are creatures of habit”, inclined to move around the same few locations, occasionally given to long hops and despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns”,

Relation to my thesis: it is rather encouraging Nature reporting on the opportunity that digital traces represent for “It’s not an overstatement to say that these tools are fostering a whole new type of social science — with applications that go well beyond the conventional boundaries of the field.” and their influence on urban planning and the development of transportation networks… and some caution on the new approach that goes exactly in the direction of my thesis and exploring the practice behind the data to better inform the analysis of tourists presence and movements:

The goal of social science is not simply to understand how people behave in large groups, but to understand what motivates individuals to behave the way they do.