Truth, beauty, and data revisited
Readings
- Chapter 12 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art1
- Chapter 26 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization2
- Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo, “Storytelling”
- Ben Wellington, “Making data mean more through storytelling”
- Jonathan Schwabish, “Better Data Communication,” National Bureau of Economic Research
- Why People Make Bad Charts (and What to Do When it Happens)
Questions to reflect on
(Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking.)
- Why are stories so powerful?
- How are stories related to truth?
- Is it ethical to emphasize certain aspects of the facts in data more than others? How do you decide which facts to use to convince audiences?
- When you’re telling a story about data, you’re inherently manipulating audience emotions. Is that okay?
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
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Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
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Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016). ↩︎
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Claus E. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, 2018), https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/. ↩︎