The ACM CHI 2021 conference has awarded an Honorable Mention to “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online”, a paper authored by Crystal Lee, Tanya Yang, Gabrielle Inchoco, Graham M. Jones, and Arvind Satyanarayan.
As Crystal Lee explains in a video summary of the paper, “controversial understanding of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground.” To investigate how pandemic-related visualizations spread on social media, the interdisciplinary team combined ethnographic and computational methods. In addition to the paper, Crystal Lee, Jonathan Zong, Anna Arpaci-Dusseau, Katherine Huang, Mateo Monterde, Ethan Nevidomsky, Tanya Yang, Anna Meurer, Soomin Chun, and Arvind Satyanarayan created an interactive article displaying the team’s findings.
Crystal recently discussed the project in Slate and presented it at MIT Programs in Digital Humanities Speaker Series. The team received additional coverage for their work in MIT News.
The Language and Technology Lab is beyond proud of Crystal and her team’s pivotal, path-making research. Congratulations!