ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lifecycle of development and adoption of infectious disease visualization tools from conception to evaluation in practice. It addresses the landscape of visualization tools developed for infectious disease epidemiology. The chapter also addresses the entire life cycle of development and use of public health visualizations. It explores commonalities among complex data types and underscore some of the challenges that lie ahead for novel visualization tool development. Visualization methods for geographic information systems (GIS) in public health focus on functions geared toward simplifying, integrating, or analyzing data in a spatial context. The simplest visualizations plot or aggregate spatial data to deliver static point or choropleth maps of individual or aggregate data, respectively. Mostly absent from these studies were visualization methods to help users understand network structures at an aggregate or summarized level, comparable to the choropleth map in GIS.
