Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Lee, Crystal et al. "Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online." Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2021, Yokohama, Japan, Association for Computing Machinery, May 2021. © 2021 The Authors As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445211 Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Version Final published version Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131130 Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license Detailed Terms https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online Crystal Lee Tanya Yang Gabrielle Inchoco
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wellesley College Cambridge, MA, USA Cambridge, MA, USA Wellesley, MA, USA Graham M. Jones Arvind Satyanarayan
[email protected] [email protected] Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, researchers have held up turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health the crisis as a “breakthrough moment” for data visualization re- ofcials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of search [91]: John Burn-Murdoch’s line chart comparing infection 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government’s rates across countries helped millions of people make sense of the pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over.