Visualization Literacy - Can we learn how to read unfamiliar charts?

Alark Joshi
Associate Professor Dept of Computer Science, University of San Francisco

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

As we continue to learn about ways to combat misinformation, charts are being used to spread misinformation as well. The data visualization research community has developed a large number of techniques to represent various types of data (multivariate, temporal, structural, and so on). These techniques such as Treemaps,
Sankey diagrams, and Parallel coordinates, are being used increasingly in the media for communication.

In this talk, I will share the need for improving the overall visualization literacy as well as our efforts in the direction of increasing literacy for students in the classroom. I will present the use of Bloom's taxonomy for the pedagogy of visualization techniques and demonstrate that it can help increase the confidence, awareness, and accuracy of the participants who learned about a completely new visualization technique. I will conclude the talk with future directions of research in the field of visualization literacy.