Perception Essay

  1. Read the two posted papers: Cleveland and McGill, Heer and Bostock.
  2. Write an essay that builds on the above two articles and explores the questions “What do we know about the role of perception in visualization?” and “Why is it important?”
  3. Your essay should include at least 2 additional studies on perception and visualization beyond the assignmed reading.
  4. Cite all sources, no plagurism, and feel free to use images, or your own graphics to make support your thesis.

Essay

Perception of visualization has been discussed and studied for a long period of time in development of data processing and display. The main purpose of data visualization is to assist in better decision making. Line chart, bar chart, pie chart is widely used in industries and financial fields. To make better decisions, we need to be able to understand trends, patterns, and relationships from a visual. This is also known as drawing insights from data.

Cleveland and McGill, in their paper, initiated a whole area of data visualization. They recommended alternative graphical forms, such as framed-rectangle charts and dot charts, by breaking down graphical perception into basic elements and then rank these elementary perception elements based on how well people process them.

Heer and Bostock, conducted their research based on the findings of Cleveland and McGill. By implementing modern technology, Heer and Bostock got access to huge test subject pools, which resulted in more convincing results.

Data literacy is one more effective concept of Data visualization that is important when it comes to understanding the results of a complex data analysis. Perception and data literacy go hand in hand. When we consider perception parameter it comes to data literacy, it helps to address a wide variety of audience when it comes to interpreting data visualization models.

Conclusion

Graphical perception is key to understanding deeper concepts of data visualization.

References

Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods, William S. Cleveland; Robert McGill, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 79, No. 387. (Sep., 1984), pp. 531-554

Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design, Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock, 2010

Variables on scatterplots look more highly correlated when the scales are increased. William Cleveland, Persi Diaconis and Robert McGill, 1982.

Graphic comparisons by bars, squares, circles and cubes. Frederick Croxton, 1932

Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations. Jeffrey Heer, Nicholas Kong and Maneesh Agrawala, 2009.