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jrlewis's picture

Scientific Figures

Submitted by jrlewis on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 8:06am.

I wonder how scientific figures fit into our discussion about using pictures and words to represent stories?  They are visual representations containing a combination of pictures and words.  Especially important to interpretation is the figure legend.  Figures and their legends are considered a more concise manner of conveying results than merely words. 

We expect students to interpret figures that we generate or present from the literature.  We try to teach students how to create clear and concise figures for summarizing data and lab reports.

Figures require interpretation by the audience/reader of the article.  However, I am not sure where they fall in terms of the observation/story spectrum.  Figures might be a lower level analysis of the results to be used in a higher level or meta-analysis of the results.    

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