VFF: Innovative Graphical Communication: Visualizing Scientific and Engineering Data

With the growing amount of data available at our fingertips, effective and efficient scientific visualization is becoming increasingly important in modern society. How we display data in reports, presentations, and publications and communicate our science to the public through visuals is now a more crucial skill than ever. In this presentation we will discuss what makes an effective figure or graphic, as well as how this changes depending on the type of data being visualized and the audience/purpose the graphic is targeted at. While we generally aim for simple graphical representations, we will also touch on examples that display data in multiple dimensions and how to create simple graphics for large datasets. These ideas will be introduced in terms of a set of "best practices" for visualization that can be applied to any discipline. We will end with a discussion of open-source visualization tools, web-based interfaces, and analytical software to support visual analysis and presentation.