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I was wondering whether the usage of the word "eyesight" is wrong or not in the sentence below.

"The purpose of data visualization is to aid people in comprehending complex data by stimulating eyesight."

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  • Is this about the English language, or about the technical definition of something called 'data visualization'?
    – WS2
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 21:18
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    It doesn't stimulate eyesight, since eyesight refers to the ability to literally see with one's eyes. So if a person has poor eyesight, seeing data in a 3D chart isn't going to make their vision go to 20/20. If anything, data visualization improves one's ability to grasp insights and trends not necessarily apparent in tabular form.
    – public wireless
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 22:03
  • Do you have a source for this quote? Or is it just your own example? "Data visualization" is buzz word, and a lot of pyschobabble has been written about it. I'm wondering if "vision" and not "eyesight" was used. The former has figurative uses, while the latter does not.
    – deadrat
    Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 0:42
  • Thanks for the answers. Actually, this is a sentence from one of my draft papers which I was editing with a colleague of mine. I believe he was trying to say that data visualization helps with understanding the complex data with the ability of human beings to see and make inferences. I wasn't quite sure whether the word "eyesight" is a good fit for this meaning. @WS2 It is about English, I do not expect any definition for "data visualization."
    – specstr
    Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 19:07

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It doesn't make any sense to me. I have never encountered eyesight in a figurative sense: it always refers to somebody's real physical faculty of seeing.

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