Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The year 2020 was only a few weeks old when the spread of the COVID-19 produced enormous societal disruptions and dominated every channel of public discourse. In a short time, the public Internet was flooded with visualizations — images used to “explain” aspects of the disease and its impact. Throughout 2020-2021 we have all witnessed the production of thousands of images, each a “representation” pointing in some way at the same phenomenon or referent. We see in this body of work, created continuously from the start of the pandemic to the present day, referring to the same or very similar events, as an unparalleled opportunity for study for the range of fields that touch on and benefit from visualization production. COVIC, the COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection, is an opportunistic corpus, containing approximately 3,000 web pages and 10,000 visualizations, collected from News Media, NGO, Independent Media, Government, Peer-Reviewed Journal and Social Media sources, classified by multiple attributes including intended message, visualization type and interaction technique. We summarize the collection and classification process we have developed to capture this body of work. We follow with examples of how the collection can be used to search, sort, filter and select examples for study. We conclude by inviting the research community to use the collection for future study and reflection on the role of visualization during the pandemic.