Data can empower citizens to help handle future epidemics

Politicians and authorities have used ordinary citizens' data visualizations and graphs to improve the response to COVID-19. Photo: Shutterstock.

By Asbjørn Mølgaard Sørensen aso.slk@cbs.dk

During COVID-19, so-called ‘citizen data scientists’ started popping up. Regular citizens who analysed and visualised data to explain the development of the virus elevated the public debate and improved official responses.

When COVID-19 first spread throughout Denmark in 2020, it sparked a debate on social media.

Questions like: How is the virus going to spread? Are the restrictions too harsh or too loose? Should we wear face masks or not? gained traction.

During those debates, some citizens started analysing the publicly available data (for example via Statens Serum Institut). To make the data more intelligible, they visualised the spread of COVID-19 and shared their work on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And they did quite well, says Sine Zambach, Assistant Professor at the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School.

“The citizens have clearly helped underpin the government’s communication. They have influenced some of the Government’s important initiatives. Partly, because some of them worked faster than the health authorities, and partly, because some were able to point to previously uncovered perspectives,” she says.

Sine Zambach has interviewed fifteen of these ‘citizen data scientists’ as well as politicians and health officials about the citizens’ influence on the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic for an upcoming paper, and she will present their perspectives at the Digital Tech Summit, 2022.

Sine originally started studying the ‘citizen data scientists’ by coincidence. She discovered a few people on Twitter who were engaged in very detailed discussions on the analyses of COVID-19 data – and none of them were professional data analysts. But they came up with some interesting visualisations and it was a qualified debate.

“One of them was a retired biochemist. Another was an economist in a bank. So, I began wondering if there were more people like them, and how much influence they had on the public debate and the decisions made by health authorities.”

Spoiler alert: There were more people like them. And they did influence the authorities’ decisions.

“Measuring exactly how these citizens have improved health authorities’ efforts is obviously hard, but it is clear from my interviews that policy makers and officials have seen and acted on the new perspectives and data visualisations that these lay analysts shared on social media,” she says.

And there are clear takeaways from the interviews.

“This work shows that there’s a potential for engaging citizens even further in analysing data and heightening the public debate as well as assisting health authorities, policy makers and politicians,” Sine Zambach says.

Lastly, the work also highlights a diversity problem in relation to data visualisation.

“Most of the people who shared data visualisations on COVID-19 were highly educated white men. We know that there is a higher representation of women and migrants in the health sector and therefore, it could be expected that they were in more direct contact with COVID-19. So, we might lose some valuable perspectives, if we’re unable to engage women, migrants and people withshorter educations in sharing their views as well,” Sine Zambach says.

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The project’s working title is: Citizen science and public policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic: Citizen science in action. It is developed in collaboration with Professor Maja Horst (DTU) and Professor Alan Irwin (CBS).

It is part of the Digital Tech Summit track Health Data: Can data visualizations save lives?