Keywords
Visualization Literacy
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Copyright (c) 2023 Margit Pohl
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Visualization of abstract data (e.g., data on COVID-19) plays an increasingly important role in the mass media. However, complex visualizations cannot be understood easily by many people. The ability to understand such representations is called visualization literacy. This new direction of research is based on investigations in other areas, such as visual literacy, graph comprehension, or research on cognitive biases or onboarding for visualizations. The following article presents these research areas and discusses their importance for visualization literacy. There are two essential aspects of visualization literacy, on the one hand the question of how knowledge about visualizations can best be taught, and on the other hand how visualizations must be designed so that they can be understood by people who have no prior knowledge of this area. Visualization literacy is closely related to data literacy, as large, complex data sets can often be made easier to understand through visualizations. Relationships in the data or extreme values can be recognized much more easily. It is therefore important that knowledge about visualizations is taught in school so that viewers do not draw incorrect conclusions from the visualizations.
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