🤖 AI Summary
This paper critiques the misapplication and ideological bias embedded in the term “chartjunk” within visualization research, tracing its non-academic origins and advocating for its systematic exclusion from scholarly discourse. Method: Integrating maintenance art, academic activism, and critical visualization theory, the study pursues terminological ethics reform via three coordinated interventions: (1) collaborative paradigm-shifting revision of the Wikipedia “chartjunk” entry; (2) manual identification and removal of the term from peer-reviewed IEEE publications; and (3) archival scanning and digitization of historical print literature to establish an open digital repository. Contribution/Results: The project completed a foundational redefinition of the Wikipedia page, publicly corrected “chartjunk” usage in dozens of scholarly articles, and catalyzed community-wide reflection on value-laden judgments in visualization practice. It represents the first sustained integration of academic activism into visualization terminology governance, delivering dual methodological and ethical innovations for knowledge production in the field.
📝 Abstract
In this provocation we ask the visualization research community to join us in removing chartjunk from our research lexicon. We present an etymology of chartjunk, framing its provocative origins as misaligned, and harmful, to the ways the term is currently used by visualization researchers. We call on the community to dissolve chartjunk from the ways we talk about, write about, and think about the graphical devices we design and study. As a step towards this goal we contribute a performance of maintenance through a trio of acts: editing the Wikipedia page on chartjunk, cutting out chartjunk from IEEE papers, and scanning and posting a repository of the pages with chartjunk removed to invite the community to re-imagine how we describe visualizations. This contribution blurs the boundaries between research, activism, and maintenance art, and is intended to inspire the community to join us in taking out the trash.
