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1. Mapping the Landscape of COVID-19 Crisis Visualizations

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445381  

   Zhang, Yixuan ; Sun, Yifan ; Padilla, Lace ; Barua, Sumit ; Bertini, Enrico ; Parker, Andrea G ( May 2021 , Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   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. 

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2. Impact of COVID-19 on Public Transit Accessibility and Ridership

   Wilbur, Michael ; Ayman, Afiya ; Ouyang, Anna ; Kabir, Riyan ; Vadali, Abhiram ; Pugliese, Philip ; Freudberg, Dan ; Laszka, Aron ; Dubey, Abhishek ( January 2021 , Publications Transportation Research Board)

   null (Ed.)

   Public transit is central to cultivating equitable communities. Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 and associated social restrictions has radically transformed ridership behavior in urban areas. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that low-income and historically marginalized groups are not only the most susceptible to economic shifts but are also most reliant on public transportation. As revenue decreases, transit agencies are tasked with providing adequate public transportation services in an increasingly hostile economic environment. Transit agencies therefore have two primary concerns. First, how has COVID-19 impacted ridership and what is the new post-COVID normal? Second, how has ridership varied spatio-temporally and between socio-economic groups? In this work we provide a data-driven analysis of COVID-19’s affect on public transit operations and identify temporal variation in ridership change. We then combine spatial distributions of ridership decline with local economic data to identify variation between socio-economic groups. We find that in Nashville and Chattanooga, TN, fixed-line bus ridership dropped by 66.9% and 65.1% from 2019 baselines before stabilizing at 48.4% and 42.8% declines respectively. The largest declines were during morning and evening commute time. Additionally, there was a significant difference in ridership decline between the highest-income areas and lowest-income areas (77% vs 58%) in Nashville. 

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3. Impact of COVID-19 on Public Transit Accessibility and Ridership

   Wilbur, Michael ; Ayman, Afiya ; Ouyang, Anna ; Kabir, Riyan ; Vadali, Abhiram ; Pugliese, Philip ; Freudberg, Dan ; Laszka, Aron ; Dubey, Abhishek ( January 2021 , Publications Transportation Research Board)

   null (Ed.)

   Public transit is central to cultivating equitable communities. Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 and associated social restrictions has radically transformed ridership behavior in urban areas. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that low-income and historically marginalized groups are not only the most susceptible to economic shifts but are also most reliant on public transportation. As revenue decreases, transit agencies are tasked with providing adequate public transportation services in an increasingly hostile economic environment. Transit agencies therefore have two primary concerns. First, how has COVID-19 impacted ridership and what is the new post-COVID normal? Second, how has ridership varied spatio-temporally and between socio-economic groups? In this work we provide a data-driven analysis of COVID-19’s affect on public transit operations and identify temporal variation in ridership change. We then combine spatial distributions of ridership decline with local economic data to identify variation between socio-economic groups. We find that in Nashville and Chattanooga, TN, fixed-line bus ridership dropped by 66.9% and 65.1% from 2019 baselines before stabilizing at 48.4% and 42.8% declines respectively. The largest declines were during morning and evening commute time. Additionally, there was a significant difference in ridership decline between the highest-income areas and lowest-income areas (77% vs 58%) in Nashville. 

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4. Drawing Graphs on the Sphere

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399915  

   Perry, S ; Gray, K ; Yin, M ; Kobourov, S ( October 2020 , 13th International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI))

   Graphs are most often visualized in the two dimensional Euclidean plane, but spherical space offers several advantages when visualizing graphs. First, some graphs such as skeletons of three dimensional polytopes (tetrahedron, cube, icosahedron) have spherical realizations that capture their 3D structure, which cannot be visualized as well in the Euclidean plane. Second, the sphere makes possible a natural “focus + context" visualization with more detail in the center of the view and less details away from the center. Finally, whereas layouts in the Euclidean plane implicitly define notions of “central" and “peripheral" nodes, this issue is reduced on the sphere, where the layout can be centered at any node of interest. We first consider a projection-reprojection method that relies on transformations often seen in cartography and describe the implementation of this method in the GMap visualization system. This approach allows many different types of 2D graph visualizations, such as node-link diagrams, LineSets, BubbleSets and MapSets, to be converted into spherical web browser visualizations. Next we consider an approach based on spherical multidimensional scaling, which performs graph layout directly on the sphere. This approach supports node-link diagrams and GMap-style visualizations, rendered in the web browser using WebGL. 

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5. The Accessibility of Data Visualizations on the Web for Screen Reader Users: Practices and Experiences During COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3557899  

   Fan, Danyang ; Siu, Alexa F. ; Rao, Hrishikesh V. ; Kim, Gene S-H ; Vazquez, Xavier ; Greco, Lucy ; O’Modhrain, Sile ; Follmer, Sean ( August 2022 , ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing)

   Data visualization has become an increasingly important means of effective data communication and has played a vital role in broadcasting the progression of COVID-19. Accessible data representations, on the other hand, have lagged behind, leaving areas of information out of reach for many blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. In this work, we sought to understand (1) the accessibility of current implementations of visualizations on the web; (2) BVI users’ preferences and current experiences when accessing data-driven media; (3) how accessible data representations on the web address these users’ access needs and help them navigate, interpret, and gain insights from the data; and (4) the practical challenges that limit BVI users’ access and use of data representations. To answer these questions, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of an accessibility audit of 87 data visualizations on the web to identify accessibility issues, an online survey of 127 screen reader users to understand lived experiences and preferences, and a remote contextual inquiry with 12 of the survey respondents to observe how they navigate, interpret and gain insights from accessible data representations. Our observations during this critical period of time provide an understanding of the widespread accessibility issues encountered across online data visualizations, the impact that data accessibility inequities have on the BVI community, the ways screen reader users sought access to data-driven information and made use of online visualizations to form insights, and the pressing need to make larger strides towards improving data literacy, building confidence, and enriching methods of access. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for researchers and practitioners to broaden data accessibility on the web. 

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