Perception Essay Assignment

Requirement

• Read the two posted papers: Cleveland and McGill, Heer and Bostock.
  
• 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?”
  
• Your essay should include at least 2 additional studies on perception and visualization beyond the assigned reading.
  
• Cite all sources, no plagiarism, please use images (either from the posted papers or from the 2 additional studies that you choose), or your own graphics to make support your thesis.
  
• Essay should be 3 or 4 pages with visualizations included.
  
• Use R markdown to create your document.

Essay

Data visualization is an effective way to improve the decision making process by using the statistic tools like line chart, bar chart and pie chart to display the data. Humans are able to understand trends, patterns, and relationships between the data from a visualization, and make their own judgement about the data.

Graphical perception is the visual decoding of information encoded on graphs, according to the recent research paper written by Cleveland and McGill. Cleveland and McGill also done some experiments on how people’s ability to perceive the displayed data from varies types of graphs. They provide 10 elementary perceptual tasks that people usually use to interpret from the graphs as follows:

Elementary perceptual tasks

Another finding from Cleveland and McGill’s study is that the order of human’s judgement accuracy, from most accurate to least.

1 Position along a common scale.
2. Position along nonaligned scales.
3. Length, directions, angle.
4. Area.
5. Volume, curvature.
6. Shading, color saturation.

The second paper by Heer and Bostock is about the crowdsourcing graphical perception, they conducted their Amazon’s Mechanical Turk experiments based on the findings of Cleveland and McGill. They reached the same result as Cleveland and McGill.

Stephen emphasizes in his paper that data visualization is to present information graphically for two purposes: sense-making(also called data analysis) and communication. People can use visualization to translate abstract information into physical vision (length, position, size, shape and color), this can only succeed if people understand the perception. He also points out that data visualization can not only represent quantitative values, it can also display characteristic relationship. Eugene and Arnab’s paper explore deeply on how data visualization can make communication and decision making better.

Death by diseases

Conclusion

Graphical perception is the base of the visualization, it can help people understand the data and make a better decision.

Reference

1. 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
   
2. Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design, Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock, 2010
   
3. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed, Stephen Few (2014)
4. Towards Perception-aware Interactive Data Visualization Systems, Eugene Wu, Member, IEEE, and Arnab Nandi, Member, IEEE