Title: Measuring Truth in Data Visualizations
Speaker: Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Date: Monday, September 16, 2013 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: DIMACS Center, CoRE Bldg, Room 431, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ
Abstract:
It's well known that visualizations can lie, that is, distort the true relationship between the variables and records being represented visually. The precursor of this topic was Darrell Huff's 1954 book on How to Lie with Statistics. Others have provided indirect measures involved in the synthesis of the visualization. For example Edward Tufte with chart noise and ink metrics in his book the Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In this presentation I will describe different approaches to measuring truth in visualizations. I will define what I mean by truth. I will then describe an open source analysis and visualization environment called Weave that we have developed and its architecture for generating descriptions of visualizations developed for ADA compliance. Finally I will give examples of measuring truth (work in progress).