How Charts Lie

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!

Critical Data Visualization Literacy

The invention of the printing press created a mandate for universal textual literacy; the need to manipulate many large numbers created a need for mathematical literacy; and the ubiquity and importance of photography, film, and digital drawing tools posed a need for visual literacy. Analogously, the increasing availability of large datasets, the importance of understanding them, and the utility of data visualizations to inform data-driven decision making pose a need for universal data visualization literacy (DVL). Like other literacies, DVL aims to promote better communication and collaboration, empower users to understand their world, build individual self-efficacy, and improve decision making in businesses and governments.