User Engagement with COVID-19 Visualizations on Twitter

Data visualizations have been a key component of online discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, research on how they affect public engagement is scarce. Understanding this would aid creating of visualizations that maximize engagements by public officials and visualization specialists. In this paper, we analyze tweets from a sample of medical experts to investigate how they use data visualizations to convey information about COVID-19 on Twitter. By comparing tweets with and without visualizations, as well as the effects of using particular visualization types, we hope to quantify the impact of visualizations on audience engagement. We learn that only 4.025% of the tweets from the chosen sample of users included visualizations. We discovered that tweets with visualization had more engagement than those with just text. Although the line charts were the most commonly used, the authors used different types of visualizations to communicate different aspects of the pandemic.