Improving the state-tracking ability of corona dashboards

ABSTRACT

Corona dashboards are interactive geospatial information systems used by billions of users to help them understand the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. I use a representational lens to explore how these systems can be made more useful. With this lens, the usefulness of these systems to convey information about the pandemic fundamentally depends on whether these systems are implemented as representation or state-tracking systems. I suggest that corona dashboards presently focus disproportionally on representing socially constructed properties (infection rates, deaths, levels of vaccination) of various things such as people, regions, or countries. They would become more useful if they additionally focused on tracking events (such as policy implementations) and changes in states (such as capacities of lockdown wards, usage of face masks). By applying a methodology for design science research involving design archaeology, I analyse the in situ implementation of Germany’s RKI COVID-19-Dashboard, develop new design principles to extend the state-tracking abilities of corona dashboards, and explore the importance, actability, and effectiveness of these design principles through an empirical case study. The contributions this paper makes are new and validated design principles for new feature implementations that can help making corona dashboards more effective and useful.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Pär Ågerfalk, Kieran Conboy and Michael Myers

KEYWORDS:

• Geospatial information systems
• dashboard
• representation
• state-tracking
• design principles
• design science research

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the senior editor, Pär Ågerfalk, and two anonymous reviewers, for constructive and developmental feedback that helped improve the paper. I am thankful to Esri Germany, in particular Dr. Gerd Buziek, for participating in the study and assisting with case access. All faults remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Allowing human users to extract meaning about a real-world domain through symbols that convey information about the things in that domain, their states, and properties (Weber, 1997).

2. Maintaining an accurate and complete representation of focal things in a real-world domain as events occur in the real world that change the state of these things (Wand & Weber, 1995).

3. Some points of debate are not representational, they are informational. For example, some countries report only selected data volumes, perhaps with an intent to “look more favourably” in comparison to others (Pundir, 2020). Misinformation is an important issue (Laato et al., 2020) but not the topic of this paper.

4. https://twitter.com/BMG_Bund/status/1238447752935325698.

5. https://npgeo-corona-npgeo-de.hub.arcgis.com/.

6. https://www.vfdb.de/home/?L=1.

7. Such an algorithm could be executed manually, for example, by assigning new user roles who are made responsible for identifying and recording external events in the IS, or semi-automatically, by scraping event information from digital chronologies (e.g., European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2020).

8. Such an algorithm could be implemented automatically, for example, through event mining applications that identify event sequences from multimedia streams such as political news (Xie et al., 2008) or from social networking sites such as twitter announcements (Aggarwal & Subbian, 2012).