Abstract:
In this talk I will report on querying the general public about their understanding of different visual depictions of data. On the one hand, we asked people to extract messages from newspaper charts. These messages were then fed back to the data journalists who created the charts. Further, I report on an experiment to make parliametory data (and stories narrated by them) accessible to a broad audience. Lastly, we performed a representative survey of Austria on a simple bar and line chart. In all of these experiments it has become clear that "visual literacy" in the general public is limited and even standard charts, like bar and line charts are not accessible to half of the population. I finish by suggesting some challenges for our research community.

Biography:
Torsten Möller is a professor at the University of Vienna, Austria, since 2013. Between 1999 and 2012 he served as a Computing Science faculty member at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University in 1999.
His research interests include algorithms and tools for analyzing and displaying data with principles rooted in computer graphics, image processing, visualization and human-computer interaction.