Education Commons^™

Seeing And Understanding Data, Beverly Wood, Charlotte Bolch

Publications

Visual displays of data are commonly used today in media reports online or in print. For example, data visualizations are sometimes used as a marketing tool to convince people to purchase a certain product, or they are displayed in articles or magazines as a way to graphically display data to emphasize a certain point. In general, it is hard to imagine the majority of disciplines in science and mathematics not using data visualizations. However, before standard data visualization techniques were developed (and accepted by the community), mathematicians and scientists very rarely used graphical displays or pictures to represent empirical data.