Author: Ana Pérez-Escoda Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
How to make good tables and graphics?
The fact that we live in a society highly mediated and deeply marked by the image is not a newness if there was any doubt social networks have emerged as colossus of the image, where the hegemony of the visual does not admit doubts. The latest data from the Annual Report of Hootsuit, 2018 Digital Yearbook, reveal that of the 7,593 billion of the total population, 3,196 billion are social network users, and 2,950 billion are active users of social networks through smartphone.
In February 2018 the New York Times produced a special «Welcome to the Post-Text Future» in which several prestigious journalists: Farhad Manjoo, Nellie Bowles, Mike Isaac or Claire Cain Miller, among many others analyzed the phenomenon of an online society in which the written text falls back as a mean of transmission to give way to sound and image as elements of universal communication.
Why does it affect to researchers?
Because academic results are not only read on paper, nor in front of a desktop computer, the penetration trends of smartphones among citizens, the increasing use of these devices to access content and the growing connectivity have changed, also the way in which science is consumed. Not for nothing when we talk of scientific and academic publications, we no longer speak only of traditional metrics but also of the alternative metrics that are produced by the interaction in networks.
It is because of this emerging and growing need that researchers and academics must take care of the way in which they publish their results, to make their work visible, so it will be essential to take into account the aspect in which they show their research results.
Below we propose three free tools for the creation of excellent graphics, images, infographics and personalized images so that the research results are adapted to a 100% visual society.
Access to EASEL.LY Access to VISME Access to CANVA
It is also important that the graphs of the research are attractive and their visualization is appropriate to the digital medium, so we propose these 3 tools for the design of graphics.
Access to Generador de gráficos Access to ChartGo Access to Creately
Web 2.0 and its wide range of free possibilities makes available to the researcher a free repertoire of options with which making better tables, graphs and infographics that will seek, after publication, a diffusion in research networks of high impact and visibility.
