{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,13]],"date-time":"2026-04-13T21:18:52Z","timestamp":1776115132261,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":44,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,15]],"date-time":"2020-09-15T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1600128000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Informatics"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Social networking sites such as Twitter have been a popular choice for people to express their opinions, report real-life events, and provide a perspective on what is happening around the world. In the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have used Twitter to spontaneously share data visualizations from news outlets and government agencies and to post casual data visualizations that they individually crafted. We conducted a Twitter crawl of 5409 visualizations (from the period between 14 April 2020 and 9 May 2020) to capture what people are posting. Our study explores what people are posting, what they retweet the most, and the challenges that may arise when interpreting COVID-19 data visualization on Twitter. Our findings show that multiple factors, such as the source of the data, who created the chart (individual vs. organization), the type of visualization, and the variables on the chart influence the retweet count of the original post. We identify and discuss five challenges that arise when interpreting these casual data visualizations, and discuss recommendations that should be considered by Twitter users while designing COVID-19 data visualizations to facilitate data interpretation and to avoid the spread of misconceptions and confusion.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/informatics7030035","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,15]],"date-time":"2020-09-15T10:24:09Z","timestamp":1600165449000},"page":"35","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":18,"title":["Exploring Casual COVID-19 Data Visualizations on Twitter: Topics and Challenges"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"7","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3694-763X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Milka","family":"Trajkova","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0662-0185","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"A\u2019aeshah","family":"Alhakamy","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"},{"name":"Department of Computer Science, School of Computers and Information Technology, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 47512, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5744-6386","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Francesco","family":"Cafaro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Sanika","family":"Vedak","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Rashmi","family":"Mallappa","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Sreekanth R.","family":"Kankara","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1145","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2007.70541","article-title":"Casual information visualization: Depictions of data in everyday life","volume":"13","author":"Pousman","year":"2007","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"106","DOI":"10.1177\/1473871611433710","article-title":"Exploring how and why people use visualizations in casual contexts: Modeling user goals and regulated motivations","volume":"11","author":"Sprague","year":"2012","journal-title":"Inf. Vis."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"Chen, E., Lerman, K., and Ferrara, E. (2020). Covid-19: The first public coronavirus twitter dataset. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Way, A., Haque, R., Xie, G., Gaspari, F., Popovi\u0107, M., and Poncelas, A. (2020). Rapid Development of Competitive Translation Engines for Access to Multilingual COVID-19 Information. Informatics, 7.","DOI":"10.3390\/informatics7020019"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Vicari, S., and Murru, M. (2020). One Platform, a Thousand Worlds: On Twitter Irony in the Early Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy. Soc. Med. Soc., 6.","DOI":"10.1177\/2056305120948254"},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"Karisani, N., and Karisani, P. (2020). Mining Coronavirus (COVID-19) Posts in Social Media. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"Zarei, K., Farahbakhsh, R., Crespi, N., and Tyson, G. (2020). A first Instagram dataset on COVID-19. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_8","unstructured":"Lopez, C.E., Vasu, M., and Gallemore, C. (2020). Understanding the perception of COVID-19 policies by mining a multilanguage Twitter dataset. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_9","first-page":"e7255","article-title":"Coronavirus goes viral: Quantifying the COVID-19 misinformation epidemic on Twitter","volume":"12","author":"Kouzy","year":"2020","journal-title":"Cureus"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Alshaabi, T., Minot, J.R., Arnold, M.V., Adams, J.L., Dewhurst, D.R., Reagan, A.J., Muhamad, R., Danforth, C.M., and Dodds, P.S. (2020). How the world\u2019s collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related 1-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter. arXiv.","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0244476"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Medford, R.J., Saleh, S.N., Sumarsono, A., Perl, T.M., and Lehmann, C.U. (2020). An \u201cInfodemic\u201d: Leveraging High-Volume Twitter Data to Understand Public Sentiment for the COVID-19 Outbreak. medRxiv.","DOI":"10.1101\/2020.04.03.20052936"},{"key":"ref_12","unstructured":"Schild, L., Ling, C., Blackburn, J., Stringhini, G., Zhang, Y., and Zannettou, S. (2020). \u201cgo eat a bat, chang!\u201d: An early look on the emergence of sinophobic behavior on web communities in the face of covid-19. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ferrara, E. (2020). What types of COVID-19 conspiracies are populated by Twitter bots?. First Monday.","DOI":"10.5210\/fm.v25i6.10633"},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"Ordun, C., Purushotham, S., and Raff, E. (2020). Exploratory analysis of covid-19 tweets using topic modeling, umap, and digraphs. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Jahanbin, K., and Rahmanian, V. (2020). Using Twitter and web news mining to predict COVID-19 outbreak. Asian Pac. J. Trop. Med., 13.","DOI":"10.4103\/1995-7645.279651"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"192","DOI":"10.2307\/2981473","article-title":"Graphical perception: The visual decoding of quantitative information on graphical displays of data","volume":"150","author":"Cleveland","year":"1987","journal-title":"J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. A (General)"},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"47","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1013180410169","article-title":"Review of graph comprehension research: Implications for instruction","volume":"14","author":"Shah","year":"2002","journal-title":"Educ. Psychol. Rev."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3199669","article-title":"Mapping History: Orienting Museum Visitors across Time and Space","volume":"11","author":"Ress","year":"2018","journal-title":"J. Comput. Cult. Herit. (JOCCH)"},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"392","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2017.2744359","article-title":"Modeling color difference for visualization design","volume":"24","author":"Szafir","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1302","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2007.70582","article-title":"Nodetrix: A hybrid visualization of social networks","volume":"13","author":"Henry","year":"2007","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gao, B., and Berendt, B. (2013, January 25\u201328). Circles, posts and privacy in egocentric social networks: An exploratory visualization approach. Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE\/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Niagara Falls, ON, Canada.","DOI":"10.1145\/2492517.2492654"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Caine, K., Kisselburgh, L.G., and Lareau, L. (2011, January 7\u201312). Audience visualization influences disclosures in online social networks. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, Vancouver, BC, Canada.","DOI":"10.1145\/1979742.1979825"},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nagulendra, S., and Vassileva, J. (2014, January 1\u20134). Understanding and controlling the filter bubble through interactive visualization: A user study. Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Santiago, Chile.","DOI":"10.1145\/2631775.2631811"},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"621","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2016.2598590","article-title":"Visualizing social media content with sententree","volume":"23","author":"Hu","year":"2016","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1773","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2014.2346922","article-title":"# fluxflow: Visual analysis of anomalous information spreading on social media","volume":"20","author":"Zhao","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2012","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2013.221","article-title":"Visual analysis of topic competition on social media","volume":"19","author":"Xu","year":"2013","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1816","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2015.2511733","article-title":"Can Twitter save lives? A broad-scale study on visual social media analytics for public safety","volume":"22","author":"Thom","year":"2015","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Isenberg, P., Zuk, T., Collins, C., and Carpendale, S. (2008, January 5). Grounded Evaluation of Information Visualizations. Proceedings of the 2008 Workshop on BEyond Time and Errors: Novel EvaLuation Methods for Information Visualization (BELIV \u201908), Florence, Italy.","DOI":"10.1145\/1377966.1377974"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"179","DOI":"10.1002\/nur.4770180211","article-title":"Sample size in qualitative research","volume":"18","author":"Sandelowski","year":"1995","journal-title":"Res. Nurs. Health"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3","DOI":"10.1007\/BF00988593","article-title":"Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria","volume":"13","author":"Corbin","year":"1990","journal-title":"Qual. Sociol."},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1893","DOI":"10.1007\/s11135-017-0574-8","article-title":"Saturation in qualitative research: Exploring its conceptualization and operationalization","volume":"52","author":"Saunders","year":"2018","journal-title":"Qual. Quant."},{"key":"ref_32","unstructured":"Shneiderman, B. (1996, January 3\u20136). The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Boulder, CO, USA."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2691","DOI":"10.1001\/jama.287.20.2691","article-title":"Empirical Studies Assessing the Quality of Health Information for Consumers on the World Wide WebA Systematic Review","volume":"287","author":"Eysenbach","year":"2002","journal-title":"JAMA"},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sillence, E., Briggs, P., Fishwick, L., and Harris, P. (2004, January 24\u201329). Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI \u201904), Vienna, Austria.","DOI":"10.1145\/985692.985776"},{"key":"ref_35","unstructured":"Wright, V. (2005, January 1\u20132). Proportional reasoning: Some rational thoughts. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Mathematical Association of Victoria: Celebrating Achievement, Melbourne, Australia."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Inhelder, B., and Piaget, J. (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal Operational Structures, Routledge.","DOI":"10.1037\/10034-000"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"411","DOI":"10.1002\/tea.3660140504","article-title":"A survey of proportional reasoning and control of variables in seven countries","volume":"14","author":"Karplus","year":"1977","journal-title":"J. Res. Sci. Teach."},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"41","DOI":"10.2307\/749385","article-title":"Ratio and proportion: Connecting content and children\u2019s thinking","volume":"24","author":"Lamon","year":"1993","journal-title":"J. Res. Math. Educ."},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"181","DOI":"10.1007\/PL00020739","article-title":"Proportional reasoning: A review of the literature","volume":"16","author":"Tourniaire","year":"1985","journal-title":"Educ. Stud. Math."},{"key":"ref_40","unstructured":"Parish, L. (2010, January 3\u20137). Facilitating the Development of Proportional Reasoning through Teaching Ratio. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia, Freemantle, Australia."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"362","DOI":"10.7326\/M20-3012","article-title":"Prevalence of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection: A Narrative Review","volume":"173","author":"Oran","year":"2020","journal-title":"Ann. Intern. Med."},{"key":"ref_42","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Haselton, M.G., Nettle, D., and Murray, D.R. (2015). The Evolution of Cognitive Bias. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, John Wiley & Sons. Chapter 41.","DOI":"10.1002\/9781119125563.evpsych241"},{"key":"ref_43","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Greifeneder, R., Bless, H., and Fiedler, K. (2017). Social Cognition: How Individuals Construct Social Reality, Psychology Press.","DOI":"10.4324\/9781315648156"},{"key":"ref_44","unstructured":"Culotta, A. (May, January 26). Estimating County Health Statistics with Twitter. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI \u201914), Toronto, ON, Canada."}],"container-title":["Informatics"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2227-9709\/7\/3\/35\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T10:10:07Z","timestamp":1760177407000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2227-9709\/7\/3\/35"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,15]]},"references-count":44,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,9]]}},"alternative-id":["informatics7030035"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/informatics7030035","relation":{},"ISSN":["2227-9709"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2227-9709","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,15]]}}}