Information Visualization Research as Pseudo-Science

Page 1 of 9 Research in the field of information visualization is usually mediocre, often severely flawed, and only occasionally well done. In this article, I’ll critique a recently published research paper to illustrate some of the flaws that are common and to propose what we can do to improve the work. This is a paper by Michelle A. Borkin, Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Constance May Bainbridge, Chelsea S. Yeh, Daniel Borkin, Hanspeter Pfister, and Aude Oliva, titled “Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall.” I’ve chosen this particular paper, not because it is exceptionally flawed, but because it has received a great deal of attention and the findings that it erroneously claims are potentially harmful to data visualization. This concerns me, and should concern us all.