Guest Post: Navigating COVID-19 Dashboards

Navigating COVID-19 Dashboards

by Kailey Fukushima

When COVID-19 arrived in British Columbia, I sought safety in information seeking. In Spring 2020, I visited COVID-19 dashboards several times daily. I experienced near-overwhelming anxiety until I learned to navigate these technologies intentionally. Does my story sound familiar to you? If so, you are certainly not alone. COVID-19 dashboards can be powerful tools for keeping up with pandemic-related data; however, they can easily fuel anxiety during trying times. This post offers an introduction to COVID-19 dashboards with considerations and strategies for thoughtful engagement.

A person wearing a face mask looks at their laptop in the dark

Corona by Engin Akyurt via Pixaby License

What Are COVID-19 Dashboards & Who Are They For?

A COVID-19 dashboard is a digital display with clusters of information and visualizations that pertain to the spread and treatment of COVID-19. You may be familiar with the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, which has become the standard for visualizing current COVID-19 data on a global scale.

Car Dashboard by Fotorech via Pixaby License

These dashboards are open access but whose needs do they serve? Jacqueline Wernimont explains that the original dashboards of the 19^th and 20^th centuries responded to the information needs of key decision-makers—i.e., people with the power to translate data into action. [17] Think, for example, of how a speedometer presents data (current speed) that impacts your ability to act (decelerate). I don’t know about you, but I am not a key pandemic decision-maker.

COVID-19 dashboards now serve a mass public audience with far less influence than those for whom the dashboard was originally designed. With that said, we are not powerless: pandemic management depends on us following provincial health orders, and COVID-19 dashboards can certainly aid our efforts. But, like Wernimont, I question the degree to which we rely on these tools and their captivating visualizations. Is there a point at which excessive information accumulation causes harm?

Pandemic Anxiety Vs. the Infodemic

Information Overload & Pandemic Anxiety

It will not surprise you that my response to the above question is “yes.” COVID-19 dashboard visualizations can lead to information overload—an affective and embodied experience which the Interaction Design Federation summarizes as “presenting so much data that you leave the user confused and/or unable to make a decision”. [13]

COVID-19 dashboards may also heighten individual experiences of helplessness and anxiety. Jonathan Everts frames the COVID-19 dashboard explicitly as “a biopolitical technology of anxiety,” and argues that “pandemic anxiety. . . arises from the artefacts of pandemic risk management”. [8]

Incidentally, Canadians have reported increased anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. [2, 3, 4, 5] Studies do not show causality between declining mental health and interactions with pandemic technologies; nonetheless, we should take seriously the revelation that the societal impacts of COVID-19 include widespread taxes on mental health, which uncritical online information practices can exacerbate.

Fighting the Infodemic

Of course, COVID-19 dashboards also serve a public good. They tie closely with governmental and scholarly institutions and make use of reputable databanks; as such, they are vital tools for helping manage the current infodemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines infodemic as “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak”. [18] Responses to the WHO’s declaration of a COVID-19 infodemic have focused, justifiably, on the need to build societal resilience to mis- and disinformation. [14, 16] Such work highlights, for example, how we can resist the crisis of fake news and its derailing of international pandemic response efforts.

Corona by Gerd Altmann via Pixaby License

What Can We Do?

Monitor Your Use

Recently, Digital Tattoo contributor Eseohe Ojo recommended digital detox for managing information overload amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian mental health resources support this technique, noting that “the goal is to take in the information you need and cut down on the excess, not to ignore the situation altogether”. [7, 9]

We can monitor our time spent engaging with technologies like COVID-19 dashboards and ask ourselves questions like: How does this information serve me beyond accumulation? Does it empower me to act? If you find yourself sitting at home constantly checking these dashboards and getting increasingly anxious about the information you find, it might be time to take a break and reduce your consumption of this information, at least for the time being.

Improve Dashboard Literacy

We can also equip ourselves with an understanding of dashboards’ histories, purposes, and mechanics. Assessing dashboard visualizations for what they are—data rendered visual, rather than a result of data’s interpretation—can help us to reorient ourselves as active interpreters of information. As Uta Hinrichs and Stefania Forlini argue, visualization is a research process rather than a product. [11]

Doing so can help us to think critically about the labour that we invest in these technologies. COVID-19 dashboards offer many specialized and dynamic data visualizations, all of which render human lives strangely quantifiable and numerical. Interpreting these dashboard visualizations requires analytical and emotional work, which often goes unnoticed and unacknowledged. When engaging with COVID-19 dashboards, ask yourself questions like: What forms of mental, emotional, and intellectual effort am I investing in my interpretation of this data? If you find yourself feeling drained or exhausted after visiting COVID-19 dashboards, remember that you are playing an active role in interpreting and synthesizing the data on the screen. This kind of reflection on your active learning process can help you to discern when it might be time step back and take a break.

Conclusion

I hope that this brief introduction to COVID-19 dashboards will encourage you to approach these information technologies with intentionality in your day-to-day pandemic decision-making.

Are COVID-19 dashboards part of your daily information-seeking toolkit? What thoughts do you have about your interactions with these technologies? Please feel free to share your experiences below!

References

[1] BC CDC (2021). COVID-19. British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC). http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19.

[2] —. (2021b). COVID-19 survey. British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC). http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19/covid-19-survey.

[3] —. (2021c). BC COVID-19 SPEAK results. British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC). Tableau Public. https://public.tableau.com/profile/bccdc#!/vizhome/BCCOVID-19SPEAKSurvey/BCCOVID-19SPEAKresults.

[4] CAMH. (2020a). Anxiety patterns in Canadians mirror progression of pandemic. Centre for Addition and Mental Health (CAMH). https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/anxiety-patterns-in-canadians-mirror-progression-of-pandemic.

[5] —. (2020b). COVID-19 National Survey Dashboard. Centre for Addition and Mental Health (CAMH). https://www.camh.ca/en/health-info/mental-health-and-covid-19/covid-19-national-survey.

[6] Center for Systems Science and Engineering. (2021). COVID-19 dashboard. Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University & Medicine. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.

[7] CMHA. (n. dat.) Pandemic pushing your anxiety buttons? Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA): British Columbia Division. https://cmha.bc.ca/news/managing-anxiety-covid-19/.

[8] Everts, J. (2020). The dashboard pandemic. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2), 260-64. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1177/2043820620935355. [note: this resource is also available open source through the WHO’s Global literature on coronavirus disease. See https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/global-literature-on-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov/resource/en/covidwho-603771.]

[9] Government of British Columbia. (n.dat.) Protect your well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak. Here2Talk. https://here2talk.ca/explore/articleVideo/Popular/dfcf2da65ce84c8a9216d21551e6d5a9.

[10] —. (2021). Public health restrictions. Government of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/covid-19/info/restrictions.

[11] Hinrichs, U. and S. Forlini. (2018). In defence of sandcastles: Research thinking through visualization in digital humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34(12), DOI:10.1093/llc/fqy051 [note: a version of this resource is available via the primary author’s webpage. See http://www.utahinrichs.de/uta/uploads/Publications/Publications/visualizationSandcastles.pdf.]

[12] Huang, J. (2020). Fake news! Who cares! Digital Tattoo. University of British Columbia. https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/2020/10/20/guest-post-fake-news-who-cares/.

[13] Information overload, why it matters and how to combat it. (2020). Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/information-overload-why-it-matters-and-how-to-combat-it.

[14] Naeem, S. B. and R. Bhatti. (2020). The Covid-19 ‘infodemic’: a new front for information professionals. Health Information and Libraries Journal 37(3), 233-39. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1111/hir.12311. [note: this resource is also available open source through PubMed Central. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7323420/.]

[15] Ojo, E. (2020). Digital detox: How I’m dealing with the information overload. Digital Tattoo. University of British Columbia. https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/2020/07/07/digital-detox-how-im-dealing-with-the-information-overload/.

[16] Walker, P. (2021). The library’s role in countering infodemics. Journal of the Medical Library Association 109(1), 133-36. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.5195/jmla.2021.1044. [note: this resource is also available open source through PubMed Central. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7772990/.]

[17] Wernimont, J. (2021, January). Covid-19 dashboards are vital, yet flawed, sources of public information. Made by History in The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/26/covid-dashboards-are-vital-yet-flawed-sources-public-information/.

[18] WHO. (n. d.) Infodemic. World Health Organization (WHO). https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic#tab=tab_1.

Written by Kailey Fukushima

Edited by Rachael Bradshaw

Featured image Coronavirus by Engin Akyurt via Pixaby License