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Covid-19 Comics and the Data Visualization of Everyday Life

Chapter of: The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19 Crisis(pp. 117–148)

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Metadata
TitleCovid-19 Comics and the Data Visualization of Everyday Life
ContributorAnna Feigenbaum(author)
Alexandra Alberda(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0448.1.06
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-pandemic-visual-regime-visuality-and-performativity-in-the-covid-19-crisis/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightAnna Feigenbaum, Alexandra Alberda
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2023-11-09
Long abstractDuring the COVID-19 pandemic our lives became deeply entwined with data visualizations.​ Alongside authorial graphics produced by the world’s biggest health organisations and newspapers, citizens and artists also leveraged data visualization conventions to express the turbulent, strange experience of everyday life under the virus. In this chapter we introduce the rise of ‘COVID-19 data comics’ by bringing together emergent thinking in the areas of Graphic Medicine and data feminism. We situate these data comics in relation to recent calls for data to be more humanised (Kennedy and Hill 2017, Lupi 2017, D’Ignazio and Klein 2020, Alamalhodaei et al 2020). Drawing on case study examples gathered as part of our broader UKRI/AHRC Covid Comics research project, we argue that integrating data and comics in ways that humanise health experiences can be a powerful tool for public health communications, data literacy and health equity. The examples of best practice we share show how innovating public health messages around an ethos of empathy can help foster what Lulu Pinney (2020) calls “data know-how” -- a way of doing ‘data literacy’ out in the everyday world.
Page rangepp. 117–148
Print length32 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • COVID-19
  • data storytelling
  • data comics
  • COVID-19 comics
  • graphic medicine
  • data visualization
Contributors

Anna Feigenbaum

(author)
professor in digital storytelling at Bournemouth University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1448-2971

Anna Feigenbaum is a professor in digital storytelling at Bournemouth University where she codirects the Centre for Science, Health and Data Communication Research. She is coauthor of The Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge, 2020) and Protest Camps (Zed, 2013), and author of Tear Gas (Verso, 2017). Her next monograph looks at human decision-making, data, and technology in the in/fertility marketplace. From digging into dusty archives to data visualizing absent deaths, as a scholar she is drawn to difficult, messy, and ethically challenging questions that exist around how we tell stories with data. As a consultant and trainer, Feigenbaum collaborates with charities, NGOs, health organizations, journalists, and other researchers to explore ways to tell humanizing data stories. In addition to author of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, she is a dedicated science communicator, contributing to newspapers, podcasts, television, and radio programs around the world.

Alexandra Alberda

(author)
curator of indigenous perspectives at Manchester Museum at University of Manchester
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-3908

Alexandra Alberda is the first ever curator of indigenous perspectives at Manchester Museum. Before assuming her current role, she was a doctoral researcher and research illustrator at Bournemouth University. Her PhD dissertation, “Graphic Medicine Exhibited: Public Engagement with Comics in Curatorial Practice and Visitor Experience since 2010” (2021), explores the intersections of the comics medium, health, and exhibition to understand potential activist and community-based methodological approaches and sociocultural values of these experiences. Her collaborative projects have explored such topics as public health, health exhibitions, data storytelling and visualization, comics, and creative-led knowledge exchange. As a research illustrator, she has worked on a number of projects, including two Covid-19 webcomics, The Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge, 2020), and an AHRC-funded Covid Comics research project led by Anna Feigenbaum (Bournemouth University).