"Even if you were unfamiliar with the concept, each day - perhaps several times a day - you might have peered anxiously through the lens of your macroscope of choice, and what you saw determined whether your day would be one marked by anxiety or relief, hope or despair."
"At a time when it was easy to feel overwhelmed with information, these COVID macroscopes brought order and insight. They took a massive amount of data and made it both legible and usable through visualization. Labyrinthine spreadsheets became elegant graphs and maps that clearly communicated COVID trends and geospatial spread. Just as importantly, these macroscopes respected the human dimension of data by making it interactive, almost tactile."
In 2020 many people formed deeply emotional, personal, and sometimes obsessive relationships with macroscopes during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Web-based COVID-19 dashboards functioned as personal macroscopes, ranging from global trackers to national models and local health-department maps. These tools converted vast datasets into legible visualizations, turning complex spreadsheets into graphs and maps that revealed trends and geographic spread. Macroscopes emphasized interactivity and a human dimension, enabling users to filter data to guide personal decisions or to monitor loved ones across locations. The term macroscope first appeared in scientific literature in the 1950s and received fuller articulation in 1979.
Read at Big Think
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