We Need to Talk (more) About Numeracy! Toward a Numeracy-Informed Visualization Design Process
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numeracy—the ability to understand and reason with numbers—is essential for interpreting and acting on quantitative information, yet it remains under-addressed in visualization research. In this position paper, we argue that numeracy should be a guiding principle in the design and evaluation of public-facing visualizations. Drawing on cognitive psychology and decision science, we propose a numeracy-informed design process: (1) measuring individual differences in numeracy, (2) designing visualizations that support gist and verbatim understanding, reduce cognitive effort, and provide evaluative meaning, and (3) evaluating quantitative comprehension across numeracy levels. Our goal is to spark a broader conversation about inclusive visualization practices that reflect numerical diversity and support public understanding of quantitative information.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it