Team of Students, Alumni Launches Ebola-Tracking Website

The Republic of Liberia now has an easy-to-read website for tracking Ebola statistics thanks to a team of students and alumni led by an interactive multimedia instructor at Carolina.

Steven King, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and his UNC team of 10 volunteer designers and developers launched ebolainliberia.org in early September. The team includes students and recent graduates of the journalism school, a student from the UNC School of Information and Library Science and two more from the computer science department.

The site, also accessible at ebolainliberia.info, was requested last month by Liberia’s minister of information. The hope is the site will help Liberian officials make better-informed decisions to help contain the spread of Ebola while providing the public with a transparent view of the country’s Ebola statistics. It serves Liberian health care workers, Liberian and world citizens, international journalists — and even the Liberian president.

The site contains graphs that include cumulative total cases of Ebola and cumulative total deaths as a result of Ebola. A map feature gives site users a color-coded view of number of cases and deaths by Liberian county.

“This project has been rewarding in so many ways,” King said. “Frustrating, but rewarding, knowing that we’re hopefully helping to ease a pretty scary situation in Liberia and knowing that our students can affect this kind of change through this kind of work.”

For more, see unc.edu report at bit.ly/WEVCZt.