Graphical Literacy - Graphicacy

Graphicacy is a wonderful term, a combination of literacy and graphics, coined here.

I love data visualization, though I admit to not being particularly good at the artistic side of it. Information is Beautiful is a great place to start exploring.

Earlier this year, when the science fair projects were in their beginning stages, we had time in math to get them a narrow picture of methods and types, but nothing too extensive.  I showed them how to make graphs in Excel and led them through a few samples, then had them create a few by hand. I also ran them through some of the correlation - causation slides from the statistics class but they were convinced of their own brilliance and didn't want to pay too much attention.

Well, Science Fair just happened and we'll be reviewing the graphs created for that. It's really fascinating what kinds of things kids will do in pursuit of that last-minute, late-night graph.  I had line graphs that should have been box-and-whisker plots, column graphs that had no business being sorted and probably should have been scatterplots and a couple other sins against proper representation.

We'll critique and re-format, re-create and fix.  It should be interesting. I'll be introducing them to the infographic in its role as a data presentation tool, too.

For the interested person, here is a chart of data visualizations that, strangely, doesn't include periodic-table visualizations ....