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   https://doi.org/10.3390/covid5010012  

   Laituri, Melinda; Kalra, Yogya; Yang, Chaowei (January 2025, MDPI)

   Data dashboards provide a means for sharing multiple data products at a glance and were ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data dashboards tracked global and country-specific statistics and provided cartographic visualizations of cases, deaths, vaccination rates and other metrics. We examined the role of geospatial data on COVID-19 dashboards in the form of maps, charts, and graphs. We organize our review of 193 COVID-19 dashboards by region and compare the accessibility and operationality of dashboards over time and the use of web maps and geospatial visualizations. We found that of the dashboards reviewed, only 17% included geospatial visualizations. We observe that many of the COVID-19 dashboards from our analysis are no longer accessible (66%) and consider the ephemeral nature of data and dashboards. We conclude that coordinated efforts and a call to action to ensure the standardization, storage, and maintenance of geospatial data for use on data dashboards and web maps are needed for long-term use, analyses, and monitoring to address current and future public health and other challenging issues. 

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2. The topology of data

   https://doi.org/10.1063/pt.3.5157  

   Porter, Mason A.; Feng, Michelle; Katifori, Eleni (January 2023, Physics Today)

   Topological data analysis, which allows systematic investigations of the “shape” of data, has yielded fascinating insights into many physical systems. 

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   https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11310  

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4. The Personification of Big Data

   https://doi.org/10.1017/dsi.2019.409  

   Stevenson, Phillip Douglas; Mattson, Christopher Andrew (July 2019, Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design)

   Abstract Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development. 

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5. The economics of social data

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.12407  

   Bergemann, Dirk; Bonatti, Alessandro; Gan, Tan (June 2022, The RAND Journal of Economics)