THESIS
2020
Abstract
Communicating data is a crucial skill in our data-driven world, but it is also largely
underdeveloped in our education system. In the current data-driven society, data is prevalent
in every occupation and has a deep influence on decision making. Data visualization
is the ideal medium for human-to-human and computer-to-human data communication.
Just the same as languages use this medium to communicate ideas, using a language requires
the learning of encoding thoughts into words and decoding sentences on the other
side. An adequate data communicator needs to have the ability to encode data into visual
form and decode the messages from data visualizations. A failed communication may
result in misunderstanding, or even worse, incorrect decisions that have deeply negative
impacts. G...[
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Communicating data is a crucial skill in our data-driven world, but it is also largely
underdeveloped in our education system. In the current data-driven society, data is prevalent
in every occupation and has a deep influence on decision making. Data visualization
is the ideal medium for human-to-human and computer-to-human data communication.
Just the same as languages use this medium to communicate ideas, using a language requires
the learning of encoding thoughts into words and decoding sentences on the other
side. An adequate data communicator needs to have the ability to encode data into visual
form and decode the messages from data visualizations. A failed communication may
result in misunderstanding, or even worse, incorrect decisions that have deeply negative
impacts. Given the importance of the ability to produce and consume data visualizations,
the current education on this subject is underdeveloped. It is an urgency to better prepare
students for both creating and critically analyzing data visualizations. This thesis
includes a set of teaching materialsnd the design rationale behind, a curated set of over
a thousand bad examples, and an analysis of the causes of bad visualizations. On the
education side, this work lays the foundation for further developing better data visualization
literacy education. On the data visualization research side, it will be a cornerstone
for future research on better visualization authoring tools to support both creators and
readers with communicating data.
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