When a Picture Isn't Worth 1000 Words: Learners Struggle to Find Meaning in Data Visualizations

ABSTRACT

The oft-repeated phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” supposes that an image can replace a profusion of words to more easily express complex ideas. For scientific visualizations that represent profusions of numerical data, however, an untranslated academic visualization suffers the same pitfalls untranslated jargon does. Previous research and commentary suggests scaffolding from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural traditions to promote meaning-making by broad audiences, but limited empirical research examines the effectiveness of these scaffolds for adult learners viewing global ocean data. Five versions of visualizations including translating titles and measurement units, altering color schemes, and geographic labels were presented on three topics to expert oceanographers and novice nonscientists. Qualitative analysis of semistructured clinical interviews suggest that these scaffolds assist these audiences but are not sufficient for novices to make meaning similar to experts without further instruction or assistance in interpreting and judging patterns of data in visualizations.

Key words: :

• data visualization
• global satellite data
• scaffolding
• pattern recognition

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Curtis and Isabella Holt Marine Education Award at Oregon State University for a grant to support this work. The author thanks Shawn Rowe for assistance with coding development and assessment of the coding scheme, and Rob Simmon and Jesse Allen of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for visualization development. The author also thanks Laura Warner, Grady Roberts, and several JGE reviewers and editors for suggestions to improve the manuscript. The SST, climatology, and chlorophyll data for the visualizations were obtained from the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov.

Notes

² Only five novices were shown the chlorophyll/SST anomaly pairing.

³ All names are pseudonyms.