Finding Gaps in Modern Visualization Literacy

Visualization literacy is a term that, as commonly defined, focuses on an individual's ability to comprehend and understand images encoded with data to visually communicate patterns in a dataset. Based on a review of the current literature, this paper proposes that there are gaps in the definition, assessment, and interviewed populations. Specifically, we recognize that 1) the definition of literacy in the visualization community is different from that of literacy involving written language, 2) the current visualization literacy assessments focus on high-level tasks instead of lower-level processes, and 3) the interviewed populations to date are not diverse enough to provide holistic perspectives on visualization literacy. The treatment of visualization literacy as several measures at different levels of education, as opposed to a one-dimensional spectrum (e.g., VLAT scaling from 0 to 53), will be essential to tailor graphical perception to individual levels. As a first step to address these gaps, we provide recommendations to tackle these visualization literacy challenges and highlight methods used to operationalize literacy in other domains that may help more effectively evaluate lower-level knowledge competencies in this form of literacy.