The power of great visualizations

You can’t consume any media these days without colliding with Covid-19:  stories of death, survival, government action, public-private partnerships, immunology, covariation...the words are endless, the descriptions exhausting and compelling.  I love data and find myself overwhelmed by the paradox of the sheer volume of data combined with my continued lack of understanding.  I can’t seem to make a path through it.  And yet I still turn to it every day, trying to navigate my way. One of my fabulous students in my Marketing Management course, Shawn, sent me a particularly compelling data visualization found at https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

I can’t recall a time that I saw a visual that captured so many layers of meaning in one place.  I have a game I have played with charts for four decades (okay, I’m a nerd).  When I see a chart, I instantly identify 3-4 aspects that could have been done better.  But with this chart, I can’t find a single way to improve it.  Grateful to Shawn for sending it to me, because it started me on a quest to find the volume of ways that researchers and reporters have tried to capture this Covid phenomenon.  So I turned to my co-creators in this journey:  my Marketing Management students.  I asked them each to find a chart-graph-figure related to Covid with the only requirement being that it had been published in the last two weeks.  

My students found a treasure trove, with a surprisingly minimal amount of overlap between what they chose.  The deliverables couldn’t be more varied in their complexity, scope, topic, and format. I’ve included all of them below along with the corresponding sources organized by row in the second table.  Would love for you to comment with your favorite by identifying the cell (i.e., 1A would be the data visualization in row 1 and column A).  One last example before we jump in:  I had one student who sent me an article rather than a single chart: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gabrielsanchez/new-york-city-landmarks-coronavirus-quarantine-photos.  I was a bit puzzled at first as it was a series of photos of New York.  

But what I found is that, after I looked through all 33 different submissions, the story told by the photos is a story that remained with me many days later: the deserted streets, the empty and clean subways, the closed library with the hastily posted sign...it isn’t data visualization in the traditional sense. But then nothing about this span of time is transpiring in the traditional sense, is it?  

Molly Rapert is an Associate Professor at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas where she also serves as the Director for the Walton Center for Teaching Effectiveness. The content for her senior-level Marketing Management course is chosen by an advisory board of 15 executives who contribute articles, ideas, projects, and assignments. You can reach Molly at [email protected] and follow her course instagram @mollyrapert #thisishowweteach #BeEpic