Charting Public Health: A Taxonomic Study of Visualization Practices in the Public Health Field

Abstract

Public health organizations regularly produce and publish data visualizations to raise awareness of critical issues, influence decision-making processes, and promote overall well-being. However, the design practices shaping these visualizations in real-world settings remain largely unexamined, limiting the research community's ability to evaluate their effectiveness, accessibility, and alignment with communication goals. To address this gap, we construct and analyze a large-scale corpus of over 4,000 real-world data visualizations drawn from more than two dozen websites associated with U.S. and international public health organizations. We evaluate salient design characteristics like chart type, visualization accessibility, use of embellishments like iconography, and design flaws. This work contributes to understanding real-world decisions in designing data visualizations and supports public health officials in improving data visualization-related communications. Visualizations in our finalized corpus and the labeled dataset can be found at https://github.com/washuvis/ChartingPublicHealth.