Mapping the Landscape of COVID-19 Crisis Visualizations
This work addresses the need to understand how visualizations impact public attitudes and responses during health crises, though it is incremental as it primarily documents and categorizes existing visualizations.
The researchers tackled the problem of documenting and organizing the vast number of COVID-19 visualizations created for public communication by analyzing 668 such visualizations, resulting in a conceptual framework that examines key components like data, messages, and circumstances.
In response to COVID-19, a vast number of visualizations have been created to communicate information to the public. Information exposure in a public health crisis can impact people's attitudes towards and responses to the crisis and risks, and ultimately the trajectory of a pandemic. As such, there is a need for work that documents, organizes, and investigates what COVID-19 visualizations have been presented to the public. We address this gap through an analysis of 668 COVID-19 visualizations. We present our findings through a conceptual framework derived from our analysis, that examines who, (uses) what data, (to communicate) what messages, in what form, under what circumstances in the context of COVID-19 crisis visualizations. We provide a set of factors to be considered within each component of the framework. We conclude with directions for future crisis visualization research.