Turning COVID-19 into a data visualization exercise for your students

By Daniela Duca, Senior Product Manager, SAGE Publishing

We will emerge from this pandemic with a better understanding of the world and an improved ability to teach others about it. For now, we need to be continuously analyzing the data and thinking about the lessons we can learn and apply. Here’s how you can join in!

At SAGE, we have been working with academics around improving and sharing teaching resources, especially for quantitative and computational methods in social sciences. Besides the mass remote and emergency teaching experiment happening right now, one of the positive things we can already identify and reuse to improve learning in methods courses is the glut of data visualizations. The absolute advantage here is that all these visualizations are produced (almost always) with the same raw input, telling a variety of different stories. What better way to explain the different uses and impact of visualizations and the use of different tools to students than examples based on the same data?  

For this blog, we thought we would make a start collating the variety of plots and multi-panels grouped based on the tools and skills required to create them. We’ve also included further resources for the type of visuals we discuss or introductory materials around the tools used to create them. We hope these will be useful for teachers and students who want to learn more or use different visualization examples in their methods courses.

  1. Mapping the raw numbers to follow live data

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Dashboard screenshot taken on 4/1/2020

While it’s an impressive effort to pull together live data from various sources, and the dashboard makes it almost effortless to follow the spread of the virus based on the reported numbers of infected people across the world, it is only that. It is not easy to draw many conclusions from these types of dashboards, and the red bubbles across the world could be visually misleading, especially when areas are more densely populated and so larger absolute numbers might convey wider spread, when in fact it’s inaccurate. This is pretty much like harvesting the wheat and selling it by the ton. You’ve got the wheat grains out of the field and into the barn, which you know is useful, but there isn’t much you can do with it if you don’t have a mill and some knowledge around making the flour and potentially yeast for something more easily consumable, like bread. 

Pros: Interactive, can be live, multi-panel, high-level view of the raw figures.

Cons: More useful when scaled to location or in this case the population; requires standard reporting across all geo locations otherwise hard to visualize missing data.

Live map: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.

Data available in this GitHub repository.

Cite as: Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real-time. Lancet Infect Dis; published online Feb 19. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1.

Resources:

2. Using R and Shiny to interact with the visualizations

Credit Joachim Gassen - https://joachim-gassen.github.io/tidycovid19/

Credit Tinu Schneider, 2020. Code is on Github. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

The beauty of using R and being really proficient with it is that you can quickly put together an interactive web interface for others to play with. This can be done with the open-source R package—Shiny. For example, the most popular shared graphs in the news have been the ones around flattening the curve and aligning the trajectories of the virus spreading by country. But as you will know, the visualization can be sensationalized when different defaults are set. With this Shiny app from Joachim Gassen, you can move the dials and choose the variables to be displayed. Similarly, with this other Shiny app from Tinu Schneider, you can adjust the defaults and see how the curve could flatten.

Going one step further, you can also use Shiny to create interactive simulations, like this one from Alison Hill, a research fellow at Harvard, looking at the spread and the healthcare capacity. She also included a useful tutorial.

Credit Alison Hill. Simulation shows modelling COVID-19 spread vs healthcare capacity

Pros: Open-source, can be replicated, interactive, can adjust the defaults

Cons: Requires some coding experience in R

Data and associated code available here for the trajectories by country, here for flattening the curve, and here for the hospital capacity simulations. 

Resources

3. Using python with matplotlib to visualize tweets

Yes, these graphs require much more work and a team of about nine researchers to collect the data, conduct analyses and visualize it properly. The Computational Story Lab at University of Vermont collected tweets in more than 20 languages related to COVID-19 and used a variety of tools to get to these visualizations: unix, matplotlib, mongodb, gitlab, and ‘an exceedingly small batch of artisanal matlab by the artist Peter Sheridan Dodds’, @peterdodds (according to Chris Danford). The easy to digest summary here, and full paper with code on gitlab.

Pros: Can do advanced and multi-panel visualizations.

Cons: You need the skills to use these tools.

Data available in gitlab.

Cite as: Alshaabi, T., Minot, J.R., Arnold, M.V., Adams, J.L., Dewhurst, D.R., Reagan, A.J., Muhamad, R., Danforth, C.M., & Dodds, P.S. (2020). How the world's collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related 1-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12614.

Resources:

4. Visualizing predictions and simulations (advanced)

This requires a whole other post, but I wanted to mention a few examples we came across that sparked our attention and that we thought could be a good way to entice anyone to learn advanced simulation methods: 

More resources:

Before you build another graph, especially for an ongoing event, where communication of risk and uncertainty is critical to saving lives, we definitely recommend considering some data visualization basics, for example:

A final point on data visualizations from our friends at ADDTWO: although seems trivial, the main thing students struggle with is the last step - making their graph look ‘polished’! Why is this so hard? While accurate representations are critical and even when many are able to pick the right chart types, data visualizations are stories, and the design and the use of colors and sizes on graphs is similarly important. Sometimes, the tools you use are either limited or not as user friendly on the design-and-polish steps. The team at ADDTWO recommends exporting (whenever possible) your visuals as .svg and further sharpening the design with any illustrator apps (Adobe Illustrator, figma and others).

Which other data visualization examples you will be using for your next workshop or module? What are your top tips? Comment below and let us know.

About

As Senior Product Manager, Daniela works on new products within SAGE Ocean, collaborating with startups to help them bring their tools to market. Before joining SAGE, she worked with student and researcher-led teams that developed new software tools and services, providing business planning and market development guidance and support. She designed and ran a 2-year program offering innovation grants for researchers working with publishers on new software services to support the management of research data. She is also a visual artist, with experience in financial technology and has a PhD in innovation management. You can connect with Daniela on Twitter.

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