As journalists, government agencies, and others look to communicate information and tell stories in visually engaging ways, making sure their audiences can understand and interpret the data is crucial. The Visual Thinking Lab brings together journalists, engineers and data visualization researchers to think about how visual systems can be used most efficiently, and how people become experts in a given topic.
“A lot of expertise is a little pile of dirty tricks,” Franconeri says. “And if we can figure out how those experts conceptualize visual information, how do we then take that expertise and teach it to a novice really quickly?” With this in mind, Northwestern is launching two new courses: “Presenting Ideas and Data,” taught by Franconeri, and “Evaluating Evidence.”