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We have Evan Peck on the show to talk about the research he and his students recently published on “Data Is Personal”. The study consists of 42 interviews made in rural Pennsylvania to see how people from different educational backgrounds ranked a set of various data visualizations.

The study raises a lot of questions about how people perceive data visualization, our assumptions about who our readers are and how they use our work. Among many findings a recurring patters is that people read visualizations looking for something they can personally relate to.

With Evan we talk about how the project started, on what are the main findings, and what are the implications for data visualization design.

Links

• Evan Peck: https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~emp017/
• Paper: Data is Personal: Attitudes and Perceptions of Data Visualization in Rural Pennsylvania
• Medium blog post: Data is Personal. What We Learned from 42 Interviews in Rural America
• Moritz’s project: OECD Regional Well-Being
• Enrico’s paper on persuasion: The Persuasive Power of Data Visualization

• Data Visualization Literacy with Jeremy Boy, Helen Kennedy and Andy Kirk
• Visualization Literacy in Elementary School with Basak Alper and Nathalie Riche