Promoting more effective communication of stories in the data

Practitioners in engineering education, in studying and presenting their quantitative data, typically seek meaning - an inherently rhetorical activity. Data displays are an important part of this discourse. Visual conventions (pie charts, bar charts, and line charts, for example) can help or hinder the discovery of meaning in a data set. Our work concerns the visual rhetoric of this community: we assess current conventions and promote contemporary approaches to more effectively discover and communicate stories in the data. In this work in progress, we present three data displays from the Journal of Engineering Education representing commonly encountered, conventional designs. We assess the rhetorical merits and shortcomings of the displays, redesign them using principles and practices from the data visualization community, and discuss the results. We conclude that intentional design of data displays can help researchers explore their data, discover questions that might not have arisen otherwise, and convey compelling messages to their audiences.

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