ABSTRACT Graphs and charts have been used for hundreds of years for data visualization, perhaps thousands of years if we count pictographs and symbols in early written languages. Creating these graphs and charts was very time‐consuming when done by hand, and journals and book publishers were reluctant to include them because of the cost. Text and tables were far easier to print. This mindset began to change about 50 years ago with the advent of computer software that made creating graphs and charts easier, as well as a series of books by Edward Tufte, John Tukey, and others that explained how the exploration of large amounts of data benefited from visualizations. Over the past decade, the development of new software and applications has enabled dynamic, interactive data visualizations, making sophisticated presentations accessible to modern researchers across various fields. No longer are these command‐and‐control centers with dynamic interactive displays limited to well‐funded organizations such as nuclear power plants, chemical company dashboards, and NASA; they are now becoming more commonplace on websites, smartphone displays, automobile dashboards, and many other business and industrial applications. In this paper, we provide numerous examples, guidelines for creating dynamic and interactive data visualizations, and offer some cautions regarding data quality.
Godfrey et al. (Fri,) studied this question.