CENOTAPH AND ELEGY OF CONTAGION: COLLECTIVE IMMERSION OF NATIONAL-LEVEL COVID-19 FATALITY DATA IN THE UNITED STATES
Author(s)
Huang, M. Jerry
Loveless, Stephanie
Braasch, Jonas
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Abstract
Effective representation of epidemiological data is essential for
informing the general public about the extent of disease contagion,
yet hard to achieve. On the one hand, the expressiveness
of statistical visualization is often limited. On the other hand, explicit
data sonification is lost in translation, failing to capture the
meaning of the data at hand. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,
which has caused excessive fatalities in the world and the United
States, has presented us with a timely opportunity to address both
challenges at once. In this work, we use the room-oriented immersive
system (ROIS) to sonify and visualize the United States’
national-level fatality data for the first 1000 days of the pandemic.
Reimagining ROIS as a cenotaph that can be experienced collectively
from within, a visual timeline in upward motion is spatially
distributed to represent individual fatality cases in scattered
point densities, resulting in the weighty perception of downward
self-motion. The visualization data is spatially subdivided and
compressed into multi-channel spike chains with variant embeddings.
The sonification, or elegy, uses a self-assembled dataset of
heavy breathing sounds and is synthesized as virtual sound sources
through a finite convolution-sum technique. The integrated result
demonstrates the method’s broader ability to effectively convey the
relationship between human behaviors and pathogenic evolution
through collective immersion while delivering a responsible representation
of infectious disease statistics.
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Date
2024-06
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Text
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Proceedings
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Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)