My COVID-19 Move Journal #2: How Hotels are Handling the Pandemic

Wonder what it’s like to stay at a hotel during the COVID-19 pandemic? Well, my partner (now fiancée) and I have had to stay at a few during our move from Wisconsin to Texas. Over the past few days, we’ve stayed at several Hilton chains (mainly Home2 Suites and Tru by Hilton). Responses to COVID-19 has varied by hotel, although there are some norms that have become consistent. The most obvious is the mask requirement: all guests (and employees) must wear masks in public spaces, such as lobbies and hallways.

All the lobbies we visited now had a glass or plastic pane separating the front desk from the customers. However, we didn’t interact with the front desk that much—instead, I checked in using the Hilton Honors app to use the digital key. In most hotels, this was a fairly easy process. However, we stayed at a hotel in St. Louis where we had to use the digital key to get into the hotel and to use the elevator, and these systems occasionally (read: often) did not properly read the digital key.

Only one digital key was available per room. If you are in a room with more than one person, each who wanted their own key, you would need to get a physical key (this was not a particular problem for me and my fiancée, though he occasionally had to take my phone to get something out of the car).

Like many other public locations, social distancing stickers dotted the floors of the lobbies. We also noticed employees cleaning the public areas more frequently than normal, particularly elevator areas and chairs.

Though not everyone adhered to the mask policy in hallways, folks appeared to adhere in lobbies. There were a handful of people who did not wear masks or who expressed extreme displeasure at the limited services (especially as related to breakfast or happy hour-type events), but this was not the norm.

Most hotels had a sign by the lobby elevator encouraging no more than two people into each elevator. We were in a few elevators with three or four people, but people also waited to take another elevator if there was more than two couples in the elevator already. Anecdotally, we found that most people did not wear face masks in the elevator. In one instance, a similar notice was placed in the elevator itself.

Noticeable Room Changes

One change that Hilton announced in April was the use of stickers to indicate when a room had been cleaned. Here is the example provided by Hilton (as seen in this Business Insider article):

Alt-Text: A hand is holding a smartphone up to an electronic lock on a door. On the phone’s screen is a green display of a digital key, marked “unlocked.” Above the key is a sticker on the door and doorway that says “Hilton Clean Stay” on the left and “Cleaned and sealed for your protection” on the right. When the door opens, the sticker-seal would break in half.
Source: Hilton, in Business Insider Article

The stickers are not always placed firmly on the door, and I was able to peel off the sticker from the door of one of my hotels (the other side of the sticker was not stuck to the doorway). Not all hotels used these stickers (including the one we are staying in now). Here’s what the sticker looked like:

Alt-Text: A blue door sticker from a Hilton hotel. Each side says “Hilton CleanStay with Lysol protection” and includes a QR code, followed by the text “Scan here to learn more about how your room is cleaned or visit hilton.com/cleanstay). The dotted line in between is a perforation that should break when you enter the door.

The hotels that did use this sticker also had a sticker around remote controls to indicate that it had been cleaned prior to our arrival. In general, I don’t know if these stickers made me feel any more secure—I would expect my room to be thoroughly cleaned prior to my arrival.

For hotels that typically provide complimentary breakfast, a to-go breakfast was made available. At the Home2 Suite hotels, this was typically a muffin, granola or Nutri-Grain bar, and a bottle of water. At the Tru by Hilton hotel, we request our breakfast by checking off a menu.

All the hotels we stayed at were quick to inform us that they were no longer providing daily cleaning or stayover services (several had “light cleaning” services, and all will provide housekeeping services upon request, like providing fresh hotels or changing the garbage can).

In general, I felt pretty safe staying at the hotels. The staff, from front desk to housekeeping, was gracious under these stressful considerations—and especially given that some guests appeared to overtly scoff at the mask rule.

Is there anything I would have liked to have seen?

There are some things that would have made me feel safer at the hotels, though I suppose these are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things:

1. Assurance that the phone is being thoroughly cleaned. Compared to pre-COVID-19 travel, I found myself using the phone a lot more to call the front desk and confirm details about breakfast and cleaning services. Learning to use a hotel phone is (in my opinion) important for any traveler, but it appears to be an especially useful skillset while traveling during the pandemic.

2. Reminders about the mask policy on all floors. The place where I saw the most maskless people was while waiting for the elevator. As most floors have a foyer table of some sort by the elevator, it seems like it would be pretty easy to add a mask reminder so that people would remember to put it on before getting into an elevator.

3. A designated place for delivery. One hotel we stayed at had a designated place for socially distanced delivery in the lobby. In these spaces, food deliverers were able to set food down (and pick up money, if necessary). We found that we felt more secure picking up food in these spaces, rather than having to walk outside (where maskless folks were often loitering) or wandering around the lobby in search of the deliverers. These spaces also helped drivers figure out where to wait for customers.

4. Information about delivery options. This is not particularly important, but we found ourselves struggling a bit to figure out which restaurants or food chains were still open and available for delivery. In the non-COVID-19 times, my partner and I dined out more when we traveled. However, we wanted to stay in our rooms as much as possible, so we opted to order in. Some front desk information about delivery places would have been a nice touch.

5. Higher pay for essential service industry workers, including fast food workers and drivers! Service industry workers are putting their life on the line so the middle and upper-middle classes can quarantine in relative comfort.

Is there anything I should keep in mind if I have to travel right now?

1. If you can, carrying your own lysol (or other disinfecting wipes), soap, and perhaps a paper towel would be useful for your own sense of safety. Even with the stickers, I felt most comfortable after I had personally wiped down most of the tables, the thermostat, and the phone.

2. Ask about what amenities (particularly breakfast) have limited services, or if there is anything you as a guest should know about the state’s COVID-19 policies. Most places will tell you when you check in, but it is useful to ask about amenities that are especially important to you.

3. Wash your hands every time you leave and re-enter the room. This is where bringing in your own hand soap may be useful.

4. Be kind to fellow guests and hotel staff/employees. This is a stressful time for travelers and hotel employees alike. It’s important to extend kindness to other people in the area, making sure to maintain social distancing whenever possible.

5. Use ziplock bags to to pack masks. My partner and I were traveling for several days, and we wanted to make sure we had enough masks to use different ones every day of the week. To keep track of used masks that needed to be washed, we used ziplock bags (one with dirty masks and one with clean ones). We haven’t needed to hand wash masks yet, but we likely will before we check out and move into our new Texas apartment.

6. Look up COVID-19 policies in the state or country you are traveling to, especially since each state varies in its mask policies and stages of re-opening. It may also be useful to look up the hotel’s policies for preventing COVID-19 spread.

Personal Updates and Moving During COVID-19

Wow! I did not realize how long it had been since I have written in this blog (not since December of 2019). A lot has happened to the world (and to me) since that time, so it’s worth beginning with a few updates:

• Earlier this year, I accepted an Assistant Professorship (tenure-track) at the University of Texas, Austin’s Journalism & Media School. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to continue doing research on global mis-/dis-information and political language in an esteemed and inviting department.

• I’m very close to defending! I will be defending in early August (a little over a week from now). My dissertation focuses on perceptions of U.S.-China trade from 2008 to 2018, and the role of news media and economic context in explaining people’s understanding of their local economy and national politics.

• A co-authored paper with fellow Ph.D student Jordan Sallis (the lead author, and a rising second-year) was accepted to AEJMC 2020 (which is virtual this as, like ICA 2020, and all other conferences).

• My long-time partner and I got engaged a few days ago!

My transition from Ph.D candidate to Assistant Professor this summer is consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the largely virtual goodbyes (though I did see some folks in my last week) to the stressful packing and traveling process, moving during COVID-19 has been a uniquely stressful and anxiety-inducing experience.

Given the unique historical time point of my move (from Madison, WI to Austin, TX), I thought it would be worth recording my experiences here.

My COVID-19 Move Journal #1: Packing and Leaving Wisconsin

Packing and leaving Wisconsin was one of the saddest and most frustrating experiences I have had in graduate school.

Though we scheduled to have movers arrive on July 30th at 3:00 p.m., they did not arrive for another 28 hours, on July 31 at 7:00 p.m. Throughout this time (and now still), my partner and I had very little knowledge about why the movers took so long, but the broker we were working with emphasized how COVID-19 slowed down all the moves being scheduled (though it does not explain why we were lied to—there were several times where the broker or driver told us they would arrive “in 20 minutes” or “in two hours,” only for us to be told it would be “six hours from now” less than an hour later).

In any case, the movers did eventually arrive. It took about three hours to fully load the truck. During that time, my partner and I wore masks. About an hour into our packing, two neighbors who we did not know walked out of their apartment and saw us. Noticing that we were wearing masks, the two men began harassing and heckling us for wearing masks while we were moving. Leaning against their car (about 15 feet away from us), they repeatedly made sheep sounds (“Baaa”) and described us as “sheeple” and “idiots.” When we didn’t respond, they proceeded to loudly say that I probably couldn’t understand them. On several occasions throughout the move, for two full hours, these two individuals took immense pleasure in staring at us, calling us “libtards,” and continually bleating at us.

To say it was frustrating would be an understatement. It made an already incredibly bad moving experience so much worse. I was perpetually anxious to leave the house because every time I was within their field of vision, they would make comments (they were less vocal when they saw my partner, a white man who was also wearing a mask).

But it also made me think a lot about the state of my local civil society. In New York, and when I lived downtown in Madison, I had good relationships with my neighbors. However, at the time of the move, we had been living in our apartment for only a month (due to a leasing issue that is a whole story of its own). We didn’t know our neighbors well this time. But, I didn’t anticipate such disdain from a neighbor I didn’t know. These two individuals decided it was worth their time to make our moving experience worse, without knowing us, without ever having interacted with us, and without any consideration, seemingly, of social decency. If they disagreed with the mask policy, they could have just as easily minded their own business instead of bothering us.

It is interesting to think of masks as a political statement rather than a function of a health epidemic. And it is frustrating that strangers can resent you so much for wearing a mask that they would go out of their way to make your life worse.

What it is not, however, is surprising. Since March of this year, conservative politicians and opinion leaders (and President Trump in particular) have frequently framed people taking COVID-19 seriously as “harmful” to American society.

An example tweet describing Democrats as un-American

It’s worth noting that liberals also call conservative un-American, but (anecdotally speaking) liberals doesn’t seem to evoke “un-Americanness” as a critique as frequently as verified conservative accounts decry un-Americanness.

These tweets, and my experience moving, reminded me a lot of sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s social binaries. In The Civil Sphere, Alexander (2006) describes how people use binaries to identify which roles, relationships, and social structures are beneficial to civil society (logical, rational, independent, strong) and which are detrimental (illogical, irrational, dependent, weak). By applying these binaries, people make sense of which values or actions deserve to be celebrated (i.e., protected in the civil society) and which values or actions deserve to be ridiculed (i.e., rejected in the civil society). For these two men, me wearing a mask fell into the latter category, which warranted their harassment.

We expect these binaries in many aspects of politics. Certainly, political Twitter lives for this binary, as negative and controversial tweets tend to receive more attention on the social media platform, particularly among U.S. conservatives (Himelboim et al., 2014). However, I didn’t know how to make sense of when this binarization bleeds into our lifeworld; when two men are more interested in harassing you for a choice that has nothing to do with them than even minding their own business.

And sure, it’s easy to chalk it up to the two men being “stupid” or “idiotic,” but it doesn’t explain why and how they got to the point where they had no qualms harassing people they didn’t know.

In the days of COVID-19, we have reached a point where citizens (a more patriotic person might say, “fellow Americans”) treat mask-wearing (or not) as a visual symbol of “un-Americanness.” In the days of COVID-19, it is easier to harass someone you see as detrimental to society than engage in any constructive behavior. In the days of COVID-19, we rarely acknowledge that people live complicated and stressful lives (made all the more stressful with the pandemic), and are quick to cast the first stone.

My partner and I left our apartment quickly after the movers left. We didn’t want to be outside with people harassing us anymore. But the moment stayed with me, as a reminder of how quick we are to designate people we don’t truly know as “bad”—illogical, weak, and ignorant.

Frankly, I have no interest in continuing that cycle. People are too complicated to categorize them purely into “good” and “bad” binaries. If we are to survive this pandemic as a society (and it’s hard to say at this point whether that will happen), extending kindness during this stressful moment in history is essential.

To the two men, whoever you are: I hope you are safe and COVID-free. I know you can’t understand this, but I wore the mask for your protection, too, even if you hated me for it. And your harassment said a lot more about you than it did about me.

After the move, my partner and I went to a hotel to rest and recover before the start of our three-day drive down to Texas. In Dane County (and Hilton hotels) there is a mandatory mask requirement. At one point, we were in the elevator with an older couple who saw us and had an “oh s***, I need to put on my mask” moment. She apologies profusely while rummaging through her bag for her mask. I told her it was alright—mask-wearing is a new practice in our society, and we are all doing our best during these stressful times. The woman gave me a grateful look as she put her mask on. In that elevator, six feet away, she and I shared a moment of comfort and a mutual acknowledgment that, in the era of COVID, we are all simply trying to do our best.

The Hidden Conference Cost of doing Interdisciplinary Work

Hello blog!

Long time no chat. May was entirely lost in the black hole that is the end of the semester and the start of “academic conferencing.” In the past month, I attended the International Communication Association’s conference (ICA 2019; what I would consider the “main” conference of my primary field, Mass Communication) and a workshop at the the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference (NAACL NLP+CSS 2019). I have a nice break through the remainder of June and July, and then in August I have one more conference (Association in Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, AEJMC 2019).

Which brings me to my topic of the day: the cost of attending conferences to stay up to date on interdisciplinary scholarship.

Realistically, I work in three intersecting fields (four, if you include my computational stuff separately): Mass Communication, Political Science, and Linguistics. Removing a component of the trifecta is not possible; it would mean fundamentally misunderstanding my research agenda.

There are a lot of benefits and problems to doing interdisciplinary research, which many other scholars have spoken on. I love interdisciplinary work, personally, because that’s where all the enjoyable little questions are. And, as valuable as specialization can be, most research questions can be studied in many ways, depending on the department/discipline you end up in. A question about political language may produce different results if studied in Sociology, Psychology, and Political Science. So, to me, the rigorous thing would be to do interdisciplinary research—to be specific in your question, broad in where you look for theory, and concrete in your study’s operationalization and methodology.

But there are substantial professional costs to doing interdisciplinary work. A Google Scholar search of “interdisciplinary research difficulties” will yield more than enough articles to give you a sense of how much the academy has struggled to deal with interdisciplinary scholars (I choose the word “deal” carefully… rarely do I feel as if the academy “supports” interdisciplinary work).

One of those weirdly silent struggles is the cost of attending oh-so-many conferences. In an ideal world, I’d like to submit to conferences for all the fields I participate in (ICA/AEJMC for Mass Comm, LSA for Linguistics, APSA/MPSA for Political Science, NAACL/CoLing for Computational Linguistics). There conferences are important for many reasons. They help you connect with others to find jobs (a super important thing for any graduate student), they expose you to the latest studies and results in the field, and they help you connect with other people who are doing similar work to you.

But each conference can cost a substantial amount of money to attend. Below are the registration cost of the seven conferences I noted above, and a few others:

Conference	2019 Location	Regular Reg	Student Reg
AEJMC	Toronto	$ 215	$ 125
APSA	Washington D.C.	$ 160	$ 125
CoLing	Santa Fe	$ 715	$ 500
ICA	Washington D.C.	$ 300*	$ 165
IC2S2	Amsterdam	345 €	195 €
ICCSS	Amsterdam	450 €	350 €
LSA	NYC	$ 86	$ 90
NAACL	Minneapolis	$ 595	$ 295

(* ICA has tiered prices depending on where your institution is located. These are U.S. prices, Tier A.)

For each conference, you also need to account for hotel and airfare, at minimum. The best conferences are the ones that are proximity close (the location of NAACL, in Minneapolis, was a huge reason why I submitted a paper to begin with), but you are typically looking at between 300 and 500 dollars for a round-trip flight to somewhere-in-the-U.S. (aka: Chicago or DC). Conference hotels usually charge between 175 and 250 per night (graduate students bring down the cost substantially by staying with other graduate students). If you are a lucky young scholar like I am, you will have tt professors who will assist with food and drink for a good portion of the trip, but this is obviously not always the case.

All in all, you can be spending somewhere between 500 and 1000 dollars for each conference you attend. This cost increases considerably for non-(U.S. and European) scholars, who have to not only fly in from another country ($$$ international flights anyone?!) but also apply for visas, an increasingly daunting task (most of my conferences are in the U.S., which makes me double-privileged as a scholar in the States).

If you’re a scholar working in two disciplines, that’s twice the conferences you may need to pay for. Or, you’ll have to sacrifice attending certain conferences in one year to attend another. For a young scholar, particularly one doing interdisciplinary research, not attending a conference means missed opportunities to meet people, connect about research, and find future avenues of collaboration.

Given this, we need to start thinking about the conference model, and how that limits young scholars who cannot normally afford to attend so many conferences. Alternative ways to participate, cheaper locations (and cheaper hotels), and having more included in a registration can go a long way.

Attending the R Forwards Women's Package Workshop (Hosted by R-Ladies Chicago)

This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending an R Forwards Women's Package Workshop. It was hosted and run by members of R-Ladies Chicago: Angela Li and Stephanie Kirmer.

Though I have attended and run many one or two hour workshops, this was my first long-day, single-topic workshop (9:30 to 4:00 pm) and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience! It’s definitely a format that would be useful to teach more complex topics, like software development and package building. There was a lot of info-in-brain-cramming, but I also felt like I learned a ton in a very short time span.

Attendees of the 2019 R Forward Package Workshop, taught by Angela and Stephanie of R Ladies Chicago!

The session was broken down into a couple broad topics: package development, git+r, unit testing, documentation, and package sharing (e.g., licences, indicating dependencies, CRAN). This made the material useful for both specific-use packages (e.g., building a data wrangling package for my specific research group) and for more public-facing packages (e.g., a package that one would want to upload to CRAN).

Top 5 Things I Learned:

1. The usethis package is so convenient and important for package development. For example, the function

   usethis::create_package("~/Desktop/mypackage")

   will create the skeleton of the package files for you, including folders for R-code, the “man” folder (“man” stands for manual), and description/namespace files. This makes package building so much earlier! You can learn more about it in Wickham’s R package book.

2. Using the “::” operator allows you to see the exported variables or functions in a package namespace. But if you really want to see under the hood “:::” allows you to see everything (there’s some more about it on StackOverflow), including the functions that are not publicly exported.

3. Semantic Versioning - How have I only learned about this now, despite attending several data carpentry workshops and classes?! I am such a stickler for version recording, even in my non-computational work (I have been subconsciously semantic versioning my human content analysis codebooks), and it’s so nice to finally have a specific phrase associated with this process.

4. A quote from my favorite slide of the day: “If the first line of your #rstats script is

   setwd("C:\Users\jenny\path\that\only\I\have")

   I will come into your lab and SET YOUR COMPUTER ON FIRE 🔥.”

   Confession time: I do this a lot! 🙈 ::embarrassed:: In terms of workflow, I am generally quite sloppy about separating projects and keeping relative paths. I first read about projects in R for Data Science, but I never took the lesson to heart until this weekend. I know… it’s bad given how much I code. So I guess I’ll be “konmari-ing” my R code this semester(i.e., create an Rproject space for each of my projects)!

5. A great tip from Stephanie’s top tweet (about Git): “when you screw up a git merge, you can use git reset --hard master@{"300 minutes ago"} with any time quantity you want in there to get back to where things were a period of time ago.“

.@data_stephanie shares her most popular tweet of all time and mind = blown 🤯 #RLadies #RForwardsChi pic.twitter.com/nCh97AE28j

— R-Ladies Chicago (@RLadiesChicago) February 23, 2019

Extra Bonus: Differencing vs. Logging Time Series Data

I happened to also sit next to economist Dweepobotee Brahma, which was a great coincidence since I’ve been binging time series models and papers for the past year. I happened to randomly gripe about how economic data is often processed (i.e., logged). She was kind enough to explain to me why economists did this, and why growth rates are so important to the research in economics and econometrics. Having been taught by a political scientist, whose questions are not as focused on exponential relationships, I didn’t know much about this alternative treatment/perspective on time series data, and it was really interesting!

I’m starting to wonder if this is especially important to modeling follower growth. Nearly all follower count time series I’ve analyzed have been fully integrated I(1), if not to I(2). Often I will first- or second- difference this as a way to make the series stationary. However, I’m realizing a logarithmic transformation is probably more appropriate for what we try to measure (implicitly, it’s a growth rate question).

Conclusion

Overall, I’m really, really glad that I was able to attend this workshop. It’s definitely up there on my “favorite R workshops ever” list. Organizationally, there were a lot of little things I wanted to take back to my workshop strategy (for example, this was the first workshop I attended where we used post it’s to indicate whether we needed help with specific tasks) and obviously it was great for advancing my R skills.

One of the most important “big picture” lessons I learned was that if I want to actually do software development in R (or any programming language), I have to be more organized about my code. I am organized when it comes to data management, but am definitely less-so with my scripts and functions. Workflow wise, I want to get on top of this by the end of the semester.

I’m also one step closer to completing a major R-new-year’s-resolution: Build an R package! I have a couple of functions that I rely on for data wrangling operationalized text data to time series data, so I’m eager to wrap them all up in a neat little package for future use.

And finally, attending the workshop was a great reminder about how amazing the R community is, both offline and online. That’s one of my favorite parts about being an R programmer—the community makes it easy to be excited about learning R.

I am so grateful to Angela and Stephanie for hosting this amazing workshop, and to R Forwards for sponsoring my attendance. If you are interested in checking out the materials from this weekend, they have made the workshop material available here.

August: The Month of Travel!

It's been quite some time since I've done a lot of travel, but my August will be all about trips, trips, trips!

In the beginning of the month, I will be attending sixth AEJMC in Washington D.C. (Aug 6-9)  to present my work on news coverage with tweets written by Russian IRA accounts. I'm looking forward to presenting my work, and taking some time to visit the city!

Then, it's off to NYC for Restaurant Week and to celebrate a friend's birthday!

Back to Madison briefly, to get ready for a family trip to Europe with John! Our Europe trip includes stops in Keflevik, Iceland; Paris, France; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After several years of travel-less-ness, my wanderlust is really itching.

Here's to a month of good adventures, new ideas, and an ever-expanding universe! - Jo