From Charts to Context: An Ecological View of Visualization Literacy

We draw on Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory (EST) to introduce an ecological view of visualization literacy that situates visualization practices within nested layers of influence. Visualization literacy is often defined as an individual's ability to read, interpret, and reason about graphical representations of data [20]. However, many of the contextual influences that shape how people make sense of visualizations---such as data provenance, visualization framing, social context---span multiple related literacy domains which each come with their own vocabulary, pedagogical traditions, and objectives. Consequently, translating broader research on visualization use into visualization literacy remains challenging without assessing the overlaps to other literacies. These overlaps raise practical questions about how visualization literacy instruction should be scoped. They complicate questions about which contextual influences warrant direct attention, which skills may be translated from related literacies, and how pedagogical responsibility should be distributed. We use the EST model as an organizing scaffold to synthesize prior visualization research and offer a systematic way to reason about scope in visualization literacy.