Scoping the Future of Visualization Literacy: A Review

Abstract

Access to information is increasing rapidly, and data visualizations are becoming increasingly common as a way to communicate summaries of large datasets, especially in media designed for the general public. Accompanying this rise in visualization is a need for visualization literacy. In this work we survey the current body of research on visualization literacy to find current research themes and guide future work. We found three themes of visualization literacy: interpretation, construction, and believability. Construction and believability are not traditionally discussed in visualization literacy research. We analyzed participant pools for visualization literacy user studies and found them to be lacking in diversity in gender and sex, age, education level, and recruitment country.

Need for a Multidimensional Framework of Visualization Competencies To Support Conceptual Clarity and Valid Measurement

“…Viewing and creating are sufficiently different from one another that literacy is no longer an apt analogy for the latter. In this regard, I disagree with Solen's definition of visualization literacy as "the ability to critically interpret and construct visualizations" [28]. I believe we must conceptualize competencies for visualization construction in an entirely different way.…”

“…Previous investigations into the concept of visualization literacy have made comparisons to definitions of other concepts including literacy, numeracy, information literacy, and media literacy among others [4,6,28]. I propose that it can be instructive to look at the concept of health literacy and the challenges associated with defining and measuring it.…”

Mini‐VLAT: A Short and Effective Measure of Visualization Literacy

“…Several research studies have attempted to define visualization literacy, but there has been no agreement so far [BRBF14,BMBH16, BBG19, LKK16, FJL22]. The ability to interpret is included in every visualization literacy definition and accounts for the majority of the literature [Sol22]. However, some previous works have argued that visualization literacy should be defined more broadly as the ability to reason with graphics: knowing when and how to create a visual representation of data to facilitate information extraction and then knowing how to interpret visual representations to read directly from the data [CRA * 18, ARC * 17].…”

GerontoVis: Data Visualization at the Confluence of Aging

“…Characterizing and measuring visualization literacy for older adults is another open knowledge challenge. The topic of visualization literacy has been gaining increasing attention from the community (e.g., [Sol22]), with ongoing debates and discussions regarding how to define and measure it. Current visualization literacy assessment platforms such as VLAT [LKK16] assume a uniform underlying capability of the users to execute the required tasks; in other words, they assume that the provided visualizations are eminently usable for all participants.…”