Oregon Sea Grant

Visualizations are everywhere, from popular television shows to magazine covers and newspapers to websites to textbooks to museum exhibits. The ubiquitous nature of visualizations coupled with increasingly accessible tools for making visualizations have created an industry of visualizing complex scientific phenomena for public audiences. At the same time, educators and science communicators have shifted from understanding their work as translating science to mass audiences to understanding it as making science more accessible by opening up access to its most privileged resources (i.e., data) in contexts that help publics make sense of science and engage in dialogue with scientists and policy makers.