Types of Charts

Two tradeoffs

Two tradeoffs

• Informativeness vs. readability
  • Too little information can conceal data
  • But too much information can be overwhelming
  • Possible solution: hierarchical organization? 
• Data-centric vs. viewer-centric 
  • Viewers are accustomed to certain types of visualization 
  • But novel visualizations can be truer to data

Information vs. readability

• Pirahã people of Brazil
  • Isolated indigenous group
  • No words for numbers 
• Previous research suggested that they were unable to do simple matching games
• Five matching games, 14 participants, quantities 4-10 (split among participants)

Data-centric vs. viewer-centric

• Web study of word learning 
  • n=700 
  • lots of noise
• varied number of objects with different properties
  • asked for bets
• had a model that predicted performance