Please review the data visualizations below. You’ll then be asked to answer some questions about the effectiveness of each visualization.

  1. Copy, paste, legislate

  2. How Does Your State Make Electricity?

  3. More than 226,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

  4. HBCUs Trail Behind in Intellectual Property Creation

  5. The NBA’s Age Limit Is Broken

Now, try answering the following questions about the effectiveness of one of the visualizations in each story:

  1. Usefulness: Does the data visualization help illustrate information that likely matters to the intended audience and/or sheds a different light on an idea introduced in the story?

  2. Completeness: Does the data visualization convey all of the relevant information needed to produce the intended level of understanding?

  3. Perceptibility: Is the information presented in a manner that the human eye and brain can perceive with minimal effort and appropriate precision?

  4. Truthfulness: Is the visualization accurate and valid? (Accuracy means the visualization correctly represents the data. Validity means the visualization represents what it claims to represent.)

  5. Intuitiveness: How easy is it to understand the key message(s) from the visualization?

  6. Aesthetics: How pleasing is this visualization to the eye?

  7. Engagement: Does the visualization invite the audience to examine the information and “find their own story” within it?

  8. What would you keep the same and what would you change about this visualization?