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1. From 5Vs to 6Cs: Operationalizing Epidemic Data Management with COVID-19 Surveillance

   https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.27.20220830  

   Peddireddy, A; Xie, D; Patil, P; Wilson, M; Machi, D; Venkatramanan, S; Klahn, B; Porebski, P; Bhattacharya, P; Dumbre, S; et al (October 2020, medRxiv)

   null (Ed.)

   The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the forefront an unprecedented need for experts, as well as citizens, to visualize spatio-temporal disease surveillance data. Web application dashboards were quickly developed to fill this gap, including those built by JHU, WHO, and CDC, but all of these dashboards supported a particular niche view of the pandemic (ie, current status or specific regions). In this paper1, we describe our work developing our own COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard, available at https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid19/dashboard/, which offers a universal view of the pandemic while also allowing users to focus on the details that interest them. From the beginning, our goal was to provide a simple visual way to compare, organize, and track near-real-time surveillance data as the pandemic progresses. Our dashboard includes a number of advanced features for zooming, filtering, categorizing and visualizing multiple time series on a single canvas. In developing this dashboard, we have also identified 6 key metrics we call the 6Cs standard which we propose as a standard for the design and evaluation of real-time epidemic science dashboards. Our dashboard was one of the first released to the public, and remains one of the most visited and highly used. Our group uses it to support federal, state and local public health authorities, and it is used by people worldwide to track the pandemic evolution, build their own dashboards, and support their organizations as they plan their responses to the pandemic. We illustrate the utility of our dashboard by describing how it can be used to support data story-telling – an important emerging area in data science. 

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2. EPISTEMOLOGIES OF MISSING DATA: COVID DATA BUILDERS AND THE PRODUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF MARGINALIZED COVID DATASETS

   https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2023i0.13438  

   Kim, Youngrim; Finn, Megan (December 2023, AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research)

   During COVID-19, countless dashboards have served as central media where people learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and NGOs created and maintained these dashboards, conducting the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and taking care of COVID data. This study uncovers different forms of data practices and labor behind the building of these dashboards, based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across India and the United States who have participated in COVID dashboard projects.Specifically, we are interested in projects that have focused on underrepresented or missing COVID data such as COVID cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, racial/ethnic breakdown of cases, as well as deaths due to COVID enforcement. These data builders employed sometimes creative, sometimes mundane and laborious data practices to not simply collect, but to produce these data that are often invisible in the official COVID dataset. In this process of data production, dashboard builders grappled with the questions of how certain data is collected, who/what is missing from the dataset, and how these data voids shape and manipulate our understanding of the pandemic. Interviewing 74 data builders who participated in COVID dashboard projects, this paper demonstrates the range of underrepresented and messy COVID data that these data builders have identified, fixed, and maintained to render them useful: disappearing data, lumped data, and absent data. Such critical engagement with messy COVID data reveals different data injustices that have tremendous potential to affect future pandemic preparation and management. 

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3. The Disappearance of COVID-19 Data Dashboards: The Case of Ephemeral Data

   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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4. Using Participatory Design Studies to Collaboratively Create Teacher Dashboards

   Dey, Indrani; Dickler, Rachel; Hirshfield, Leanne; Goss, William; Tissenbaum, Mike; Puntambekar, Sadhana (July 2022, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education)

   Classroom orchestration requires teachers to concurrently manage multiple activities across multiple social levels (individual, group, and class) and under various constraints. Real-time dashboards can support teachers; however, designing actionable dashboards is a huge challenge. This paper describes a participatory design study to identify and inform critical features of a dashboard for displaying relevant, actionable, real-time data. We leveraged a Sense-Assess-Act framework to present dashboard mockups to teachers for feedback. Although the participating teachers differed in how they would use the presented information (during class or after class as a post hoc analysis tool), two common emerging themes were that they wanted to use the data to a) better support their students and b) to make broader instructional decisions. We present data from our study and propose a customizable, mobile dashboard, that can be adapted to a teacher's specific needs at a specific time, to help them better facilitate learning activities. 

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5. A case study approach to understanding a remote undergraduate research program

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2021.pr.Zohrabi_Alaee  

   Zohrabi Alaee, Dina; Zwickl, Benjamin M. (October 2021, Physics Education Research Conference 2021)

   Due to the growing concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities either canceled or remotely hosted their 2020 National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs. This analysis is part of a larger study examining the impact of these fully remote experiences on professional and psychosocial factors such as mentees' sense of belonging, identity, and self-efficacy and their retention in STEM degree programs. We present a single-student case study and describe the dramaturgical analysis which centers on identifying five fundamental constructs within the data: objectives, conflicts, tactics, attitudes, and emotions. These items investigate what the participant in the remote REU program experienced and how this experience changed the ways in which he thinks about his future career decision-making. Our analysis explored four different sub-narratives: lack of community in virtual REU, mentor support, perception of the "real" nature of the experience in a virtual format, and future career decision-making. The mentee reported that this experience was highly beneficial and that he developed a sense of belonging and identity, despite working remotely -- often from his own bedroom. 

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