Today I wanted to try to tease apart two different “categories” of data visualizations that I’ve seen in the past few months: those that try to “accurately” depict the present, and others that try to establish an alternative future/ taking the present and interpreting it in a novel context. I really started to think about the distinction here when Rei shared the link of the Washington Post article, entitled “What if all COVID19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood?” The visualization directed the audience to “find out what would happen if your neighborhood was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.”

I feel like this Washington Post visualization, in comparison to the logarithmic-scaled COVID19 line graph that we discussed in class yesterday, attempts to dissect the unevenness that gets hidden by aggregation. Some of the irregularities that have been exposed by the COVID19 pandemic is that United States residents are unequally affected by the pandemic; some have lost many relatives and loved ones, while some remain “untouched.” I felt like the Washington Post visualization dismantled aggregation by transferring the “dots” that represent COVID19 deaths into your neighbor’s identities. I’ve included some images that resulted from my walk-through of the simulation, but the emotional effect that I experienced with this visualization is drastically different from the bar charts shown on my local news stations. By looking at my own neighborhood, I could point at dots and say “that’s Trisha” or “that’s my best friend and her family.” This almost felt like a journey of how COVID19 “pixelations” of people become whole again, by incorporating my neighborhood context and the memories that come along with it. Like Ailee was saying yesterday with indexical landscapes, this visualization makes the pandemic not only visible, but relevant to people by using their own backyard.

This makes me question whether the goal of COVID19 data visualizations should be to “accurately” depict the pandemic, or to increase the pandemic’s relevance to everyone. In Pittsburgh, I’ve been experiencing the idea where people are “over” the pandemic, which is contrary to the daily reported data of PA and Allegheny county continuing to set new records of daily positive cases. I think some of the problems in this lie in the data visualizations like the logarithmic one, because without a deep analysis and understanding of scale, the audience doesn’t visually experience the exponential growth of the pandemic and the vast difference between the US and other countries. Do visualizations like this provide a “false reality” or sense of security because they aren’t as “accessible” in terms of immediate comprehension of the data?