Börner, Maltese, Balliet, and Heimlich studied the data visualization literacy of 273 visitors to three different educational United States science museums. They found that while the average visitor had an interest in the museum topics (and some had backgrounds in STEM fields), many struggled to identify and interpret advanced visualizations. Adults were more familiar with the types of visualizations than children, and had seen visuals in more aspects of life, but both groups reported school as the primary source of exposure. Both groups also identified color, size, quantity, and shape as important factors in understanding what was being presented. A significant portion of participants indicated a desire for explanatory keys, while a small percentage admitted to not knowing how to read the representation. Unsurprisingly, there was a high rate of cross-identification and misidentification of visualizations by participants, and participants found it difficult to match the appropriate data with a visual representation. The findings of in this paper were relayed in a combination of charts, graphs, and written text, and I find them to be believable.
After reading this paper I wish we had decided to spend more time on the intricacies of data representation, because data is only useful if it can be understood. One of our unimplemented/discarded tasks was to allow curators the ability to create their own visualizations. This would require the implementation of careful parameters and design features so curators have to think critically about the accessibility of their visuals (no matter the intended audience). However, I do think that we have designed something that will help improve the illiteracy described in this paper, despite not implementing the aforementioned feature. Since we are visually presenting trends and data as well as visitor feedback, curators will be exposed to visualizations they may or may not love, as well as comments and questions pertaining to any aspect of the museum. If there are visualizations that visitors don’t understand, they can reach out to curators for help. Given our question response task, I think it would be useful for curators to place “ask us” prompts beside data visualizations in exhibits.
Börner, K., Maltese, A., Balliet, R. N., & Heimlich, J. (2016). Investigating aspects of data visualization literacy using 20 information visualizations and 273 science museum visitors. Information Visualization, 15(3), 198–213. Access Here