Deathly Dataviz: What happens when public health dashboards backfire?

Welcome, OMLDS members and Happy New Year 2025!

• Can visualizing health disparities make them worse?
• Can information design choices influence our health?

In this talk, we'll explore the social impacts of visualizing health outcomes for priority populations. Specifically, we'll cover Eli's recent IEEE VIS research into how popular conventions for public health visualizations (e.g. bar charts of group mortality risks) can promote harmful misbeliefs, with downstream implications for the populations being visualized.

We'll discuss:

• How popular data visualizations from civic institutions can unintentionally reinforce the disparities they aim to highlight
• The hidden biases pervasive in public-facing population health charts
• Alternative design approaches for presenting group outcomes safely, ethically, and effectively

Our guest speaker, Eli Holder, is a data designer, researcher, and leading expert on equitable, ethical, and effective information design. Eli's design practice, "3 is a pattern" (3iap), specializes in psychologically impactful data visualization. 3iap partners with clients on design, research, and development projects, as well as consulting, training, and workshops. Eli's research and writing focus on the intersection of social psychology and data communication, looking at the not-quite-rational ways that data can reflect and influence people's attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and emotions. His most recently published study ("Must Be A Tuesday"), examines the health and health equity implications of visualizing mortality risk across different racial groups in the United States.