Challenges and Opportunities in Data Visualization Education: A Call to Action

This project is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization.

Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combines knowledge from different fields, is tailored to suit diverse audiences and contexts, and frequently incorporates tacit knowledge. This complex nature leads to a series of interrelated challenges for data visualization education.

Driven by a lack of consolidated knowledge, overview, and orientation for visualization education, the 21 authors of this paper—educators and researchers in data visualization—identify and describe 19 challenges informed by our collective practical experience. We organize these challenges around seven themes

• People,
• Goals & Assessment,
• Environment,
• Motivation,
• Methods,
• Materials, and
• Change.

Final all challenges here

Across these themes, we formulate 43 research questions to address these challenges. As part of our call to action, we then conclude with 5 cross-cutting opportunities and respective action items:

• embrace DIVERSITY+INCLUSION,
• build COMMUNITIES,
• conduct RESEARCH,
• act AGILE, and
• relish RESPONSIBILITY.

We aim to inspire researchers, educators and learners to drive visualization education forward and discuss why, how, who and where we educate, as we learn to use visualization to address challenges across many scales and many domains in a rapidly changing world.

Read the paper

• Challenges and Opportunities in Data Visualization Education: A Call to Action: Benjamin Bach, Mandy Keck, Fateme Rajabiyazdi, Tatiana Losev, Isabel Meirelles, Jason Dykes, Robert S. Laramee, Mashael AlKadi, Christina Stoiber, Samuel Huron, Charles Perin, Luiz Morais, Wolfgang Aigner, Doris Kosminsky, Magdalena Boucher, Søren Knudsen, Areti Manataki, Jan Aerts, Uta Hinrichs, Jonathan C. Roberts, Sheelagh Carpendale. IEEE VIS 2023, accepted for publication

Tell us about your challenges

Tell us about the challenges you encounter in teaching and learning visualizations and that you find important. We will publish a selection of answers on this website.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Dagstuhl 22261 on Visualization Empow- erment. We gratefully thank the organisers, all participants, and funders of the seminar for their inspiration, contributions and encouragement.

Contributors

• Benjamin Bach, Unviersity of Edinburgh
• Mandy Keck, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• Fateme Rajabiyazdi, Carleton University
• Tatiana Losev, Simon Fraser University
• Isabel Meirelles, OCAD
• Jason Dykes, City University London
• Robert S. Laramee, University of Nottingham
• Mashael AlKadi, Unviersity of Edinburgh
• Christina Stoiber, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten
• Samuel Huron, Telecom ParisTech
• Charles Perin, University of Victoria
• Luiz Morais, Voxar Labs
• Wolfgang Aigner, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten
• Doris Kosminsky, Universidate Federal de Rio de Janeiro
• Magdalena Boucher, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten
• Søren Knudsen, University of Copenhagen
• Areti Manataki, University of St. Andrews
• Jan Aerts, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven
• Uta Hinrichs, Unviersity of Edinburgh
• Jonathan C. Roberts, Bangor University
• Sheelagh Carpendale, Simon Fraser University

Coming soon:

• survey
• Video teaser
• Presentation file
• pres recording
• table of challenges + RQs