Reaching Broader Audiences With Data Visualization

Magdalena Boucher Luiz Morais Fateme Rajabiyazdi + 18 lainnya

15 Agustus 2023

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education. Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper—educators and researchers in data visualization—identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes People, Goals & Assessment, Environment, Motivation, Methods, Materials, and Change. Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items: embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION, build COMMUNITIES, conduct RESEARCH, act AGILE, and relish RESPONSIBILITY. We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world: viseducationchallenges.github.io.

Bongshin Lee Kathleen F. McCoy Edward Cutrell + 6 lainnya

27 April 2021

driven communication by business, government, and science. Furthermore, the use and need for visualizations is not just confined to data experts: Data visualizations are becoming ubiquitous in textbooks, presentations, and reports, as well as in popular media, both online and in print. The design of these visualizations, however, is premised on implicit assumptions about the reader's sensory, cognitive, and motor abilities. People without these abilities are ultimately disenfranchised, and access to the benefits of data visualization and to the underlying information is limited. Data visualizations, such as statistical charts, diagrams, and maps, are an effective means to represent, analyze, and explore data as well as identify and communicate insights. They take advantage of the human visual system’s high bandwidth, parallel processing, and ability to quickly recognize patterns. For instance, a table of numbers may be hard to understand, while those same numbers shown in a graphic form (such as a line chart) will immediately reveal a steadily increasing trend. For these reasons, interactive data visualization is central to both exploratory data analysis and dataD Insights → Lack of accessible access to data visualizations is a significant equity issue. → It's not only visual impairments that can restrict access but also other kinds of disabilities including cognitive and learning disabilities, and motor disabilities. → Overcoming this challenge requires visualization practitioners, visualization and accessibility researchers, and the relevant disability communities to work together.

V. Lechner

16 April 2020

Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Kathleen Garrity Shakila Cherise S. Joyner Yea-Seul Kim + 2 lainnya

27 April 2022

Data visualizations are now widely used across many disciplines. However, many of them are not easily accessible for visually impaired people. In this work, we use three-staged mixed methods to understand the current practice of accessible visualization design for visually impaired people. We analyzed 95 visualizations from various venues to inspect how they are made inaccessible. To understand the rationale and context behind the design choices, we also conducted surveys with 144 practitioners in the U.S. and follow-up interviews with ten selected survey participants. Our findings include the difficulties of handling modern complex and interactive visualizations and the lack of accessibility support from visualization tools in addition to personal and organizational factors making it challenging to perform accessible design practices.

Zack While R. Crouser Ali Sarvghad

19 Maret 2024

Despite the explosive growth of the aging population worldwide, older adults have been largely overlooked by visualization research. This paper is a critical reflection on the underrepresentation of older adults in visualization research. We discuss why investigating visualization at the intersection of aging matters, why older adults may have been omitted from sample populations in visualization research, how aging may affect visualization use, and how this differs from traditional accessibility research. To encourage further discussion and novel scholarship in this area, we introduce GerontoVis, a term which encapsulates research and practice of data visualization design that primarily focuses on older adults. By introducing this new subfield of visualization research, we hope to shine a spotlight on this growing user population and stimulate innovation toward the development of aging‐aware visualization tools. We offer a birds‐eye view of the GerontoVis landscape, explore some of its unique challenges, and identify promising areas for future research.