Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Oct 25, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 25, 2022 - Dec 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 24, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 25, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Visualizing data about the coronavirus pandemic in the United States: A survey of online COVID-19 dashboards and trackers
ABSTRACT
Background:
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic provided an opportunity to employ public-facing online data visualization tools to help citizens understand the evolving status the outbreak. Given the heterogeneity of data sources, developers, tools, and designs employed in this effort, it raises questions about how visualizations were constructed during a time that daily batches of data were available but issues of data quality and standardization were unresolved.
Objective:
This report surveys online COVID-19 dashboards and trackers used by residents of the United States to monitor the spread of infection at local, national, and global scales. The work is intended to provide insights that will help application developers to increase the usefulness, transparency, and trustworthiness of dashboards and trackers for public health data in the future.
Methods:
Websites of coronavirus dashboards and trackers were identified in August 2020 using the Google search engine. They were examined to determine the data sources used, types of data presented, types of data visualizations, characteristics of the visualizations, and issues with "messy" data. The websites were surveyed three more times for changes in design and data sources, with the final survey in June 2022. Themes were developed to highlight issues concerning challenges in presenting COVID-19 data and techniques of effective visualizations.
Results:
A total of 111 websites were identified and examined (84 state-focused, 11 nation-wide, and 16 with global data), plus an additional 17 later added for state vaccination data. This work documents how data aggregators have played a central role in making data accessible to visualization developers. The designs of dashboard and tracker visualizations vary in type and quality, with some well-designed displays supporting interpretation of the data and others obscuring the meaning of the data and potentially misleading viewers.
Conclusions:
This analysis reveals the extent to which dashboards and trackers informing the American public about the COVID-19 pandemic relied upon an ad-hoc pipeline of data sources and data aggregators. The dashboards and trackers identified in this survey offer an opportunity to compare different approaches to the display of similar data.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.