The Unfortunate Fringes of Visualization Literacy

Written language has been in use for thousands of years. For the majority of its existence, a small set of people were able to understand and construct text. These people were likely wealthy and had access to resources and education that allowed them to learn the skills of reading and writing, otherwise known as literacy. Literacy among the general population has been increasing significantly over the past century due to the increasing accessibility of education. However, this change is still limited to the more privileged portion of the population. Information, including but not limited to written language, has seen an increase in collection and accessibility in recent history. In order to allow people to understand information, particularly that which is domain-specific, not human-readable, or of large scale, it is increasingly common to visualize it. Additionally, information visualizations are becoming more accessible to the public through their increasingly common use by organizations with large audiences like news outlets and social media pages where they are used for a variety of reasons such as catching users’ eyes and quickly communicating summaries of data. With this method of communicating information comes a new form of literacy: visualization literacy. Analogous to written literacy, early on, visualizations were only comprehensible to highly educated individuals, and now, with their rising popularity, the general population is gaining more exposure. Despite this, visualization literacy in the general public is low [4]. Visualization education is primarily accessible to privileged individuals. While some researchers have addressed this gap in visualization literacy, they often create resources such as online courses taught in English [11] that are inaccessible to those without a strong, consistent internet connection and fluency in English. Further, much of the work into visualization education focuses on teaching young children despite adults likely struggling as well, for example older adults who have difficulty comprehending novel chart types and prefer simple ones, even if considered less effective by the visualization community [8]. The most common theme in the definitions is the ability to read, understand, interpret, or comprehend visualizations [1–6, 9–14]. Second as common is the ability to create or construct visualizations [1, 2, 10]. These two are likely common due to the connection to the traditional meaning of literacy: the ability to read and write. As they have been the most common themes in the existing literature, they have been the most heavily researched and developed. Existing assessments of visualization literacy such as VLAT [11] focus on these two themes and sets of sub-themes have been proposed. Recent work has dug into parts of visualization that are not explicitly considered visualization literacy but are related. This research focuses on how aspects of socioeconomic status affect the perception of visualizations, engagement and interest in visualizations, and the skill of critical but neutral evaluation of visualizations. This area of work which I will call the fringes of visualization literacy is what I focus on