A nice post here from A Beautiful WWW 5 Reasons Visualization Is Not More Prevalent. The reasons listed are (you need to follow the link to get the full story):
- People don't know what data visualization is,
- Crappy existing visualizations have polluted perception,
- People are unable to mentally separate the view from the data,
- Visualization is difficult to create and easy to copy,
- People won't pay for visualization.
It is good to see this discussion (see some follow on posts). However, I'd be interested in understanding what the measures are for 'prevelant' and the rate of change. My position is that if the general consumer of media were more data literate then they would be more efficient at grokking the state of affairs and thus better informed. So, how prevalent should data visualization be?
As for baselines, there are probably a number of dimensions to measure on (the number of data visualization elements observed, the complexity of the element, the complexity of the data, the relationship between the data and the roles of citizenship - such as voting - and so on). The USA Today has a good number of data visualization, um, things in its print versions, but the complexity of the underlying data is low.
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