This activity has been accepted by a Panel Peer Review
HideThis resource received an Accept or Accept with minor revisions rating from a Panel Peer Review process
These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This page first made public: Dec 1, 2006
This material was originally created for
Starting Point:Introductory Geology and is replicated here as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service.
What are Visualizations?
Visualizations can present massive amounts of information to help scientists identify relevant patterns and processes in nature. Data visualization techniques range from simple pie charts or x-y scatter plots to colorful contour plots and 3-D images that can be manipulated and viewed from a variety of orientations and with a variety of color schemes. Spreadsheets like Excel have good basic graphing capabilities which are in essence visualizations. We have discussed the use of Excel for graphing data and model output in several examples. Our primary focus here will be the more sophisticated visualizations, which allow one to visualize multidimensional data.
Typically, visualizations for multidimensional data sets allow the users to:
- Select a particular subset of a data set in space and/or time;
- Create 3-D and contour plots;
- View data from different orientations;
- Create and view animations of data at different rates;
- Customize the color enhancement of images to highlight features of particular interest;
Visualizations typically fall into one of the categories below:
- Many interactive web based data sites are available that allow visitors to select and view different science data.
- Visualization software allows one to generate images and animations from mathematical functions or from your own data or data sets of your choice.
- Visualizations of output from mathematical or statistical models is one of the best ways to convey model behavior for large complex models, e.g. for visualization of results from a general circulation model of the ocean or atmosphere.