How Charts Lie
Why Critical Literacy is Critical!
Like “the numbers” or “the stats”, data visualizations are very convincing! Marketing, politicians, media, businesses, professors, and your friends all know this–we get bombarded with visual information everyday trying to persuade us. We interpret data visualizations to make decisions, from simple everyday choices to huge impactful decisions.
In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (2019), Alberto Cairo says visualizations can be misleading, misunderstood, or actually lying by:
- being poorly designed
- displaying dubious data
- displaying insufficient data
- concealing or confusing uncertainty
- suggesting misleading patterns
We need to carefully evaluate and interpret visualizations to ensure we are reading the correct information and are able to avoid misleading information. A critical eye is necessary!