RAMPVIS: Towards a New Methodology for Developing Visualisation Capabilities for Large-scale Emergency Responses

Chen, Min; Abdul‐Rahman, Alfie; Archambault, Daniel; Dykes, Jason; Slingsby, Aidan; Ritsos, Panagiotis D.; Torsney-Weir, Thomas; Turkay, Çağatay; Bach, Benjamin; Brett, Alys; Fang, Hui; Jianu, Radu; Khan, Saiful; Laramee, Robert S.; Nguyêñ, Phong Q.; Reeve, Richard; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Vidal, Franck; Wang, Qiru; Wood, Jo; Xu, Kai

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.04757

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Visualizations have played an increasingly critical role in crisis communication and management and have served as integral components of crisis information infrastructure [12,57,76]. Information infrastructures refer to networks of sociotechnical systems [34].…”

Section: Visualization In Crisis Communication and Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization Design Practices in a Crisis: Behind the Scenes with COVID-19 Dashboard Creators

Zhang¹,

Gaggiano²,

Kumar³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. Prior work on COVID-19 visualizations has primarily focused on the design and evaluation of specific visualization systems from technology-centered perspectives. However, little is known about what occurs behind the scenes during the visualization creation processes, given the complex sociotechnical contexts in which they are embedded. Yet, such ecological knowledge is necessary to help characterize the nuances and trajectories of visualization design practices in the wild, as well as generate insights into how creators come to understand and approach visualization design on their own terms and for their own situated purposes. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how did visualization creators engage in COVID-19 dashboard design, and what tensions, conflicts, and challenges arose during this process? Our findings detail the trajectory of design practices-from creation to expansion, maintenance, and termination-that are shaped by the complex interplay between design goals, tools and technologies, labor, emerging crisis contexts, and public engagement. We particularly examined the tensions between designers and the general public involved in these processes. These conflicts, which often materialized due to a divergence between public demands and standing policies, centered around the type and amount of information to be visualized, how public perceptions shape and are shaped by visualization design, and the strategies utilized to deal with (potential) misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations. Our findings and lessons learned shed light on new ways of thinking in visualization design, focusing on the bundled activities that are invariably involved in human and nonhuman participation throughout the entire trajectory of design practice.

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Section: Visualization In Crisis Communication and Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization Design Practices in a Crisis: Behind the Scenes with COVID-19 Dashboard Creators

Zhang¹,

Gaggiano²,

Kumar³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…• Using an existing platform that would allow us to create plots and dashboards without programming. ŏ We could not use this approach because (i) the generic support team had to implement novel and nuanced visual designs produced by other teams [8]; (ii) we did not have any funds to purchase a server license and consultancy for database connection; and (iii) creating and managing numerous plots and dashboards would be challenging. • Programming plots and dashboards with a UI for browsing suitable data.…”

Section: Problem Statement and System Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…RAMPVIS [8] is a group of volunteers specialized in Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), who answered a call to support the modeling scientists and epidemiologists in the Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium (SCRC). One major challenge identified at the beginning (May 2020) was that there was a huge amount of data that epidemiologists and modeling scientists in the SCRC needed to access rapidly but could only do so via data files in a variety of inconsistent formats, requiring time-consuming processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Propagating Visual Designs to Numerous Plots and Dashboards

Khan¹,

Nguyen²,

Abdul‐Rahman³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Fig. 1. Our novel propagation workflow makes it easy to propagate visual designs to numerous datasets. Reference visualizations are created for data streams, which are associated with several keywords in our ontology. A search and activate process is used to propagate the reference visualisation to other appropriate data streams. (1) Ontology keywords are used to construct a query in our search UI for suitable data stream combinations. ( 2) Search results consist of ranked data stream combinations that match query parameters, although some results may not be suitable for propagation. (3) A quality assurance step carried out by an expert ensures the visual design is only propagated to suitable data, resulting in new visualizations that are immediately deployed as web pages.

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“…When the visualization volunteers formed the RAMPVIS group [5], [6], several teams of epidemiologists and modeling scientists in the SCRC were working intensively on multiple epidemiological models, while a team of research software engineers were developing the SCRC data infrastructure to host a huge volume of data, including captured COVID-19 data, model predictions, parameters and internal data of simulation runs, and so on. One urgent requirement was therefore to enable users to visualize data hosted by the SCRC data infrastructure, which was expected to be ready and operational in two to three months.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The many activities of the RAMPVIS consortium have been summarized in a report [6] that gives a high-level overview of ongoing work across several visualization teams and offers little insight into the technical infrastructure developed during this project. In a recent paper [7], we described a novel technique for generating visualizations and dashboards semi-automatically.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%