How Charts Lie, Alberto Cairo
How Charts Lie, Alberto Cairo
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How Charts Lie
Getting Smarter about Visual Information

Author: Alberto Cairo

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Unabridged: 5 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 10/15/2019


Synopsis

We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don't understand what we're looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous—and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter—if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways—displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty—or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie, data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Anbu

An interesting read, even when I knew part of what was discussed. He recommends a few books and hopefully I get to read some of them. I marked some of them as want-to-read, but I also have the habit of keeping the list updated and thereby removing and losing all these suggestions. Books about reasoni......more

Great book covering many practical and theoretical layers of data/information visualization and journalism. The dozens of examples come from a wide variety of topics like US elections, global development, climate change, movie industry, hurricanes, public health, evolutionary history, among others,......more

I was so looking forward to reading this book but when I did, it was very disappointing. The book and charts were hard to read (bad choice of colors, sizes and layout). This was a surprise since the book is about how to make charts easier to read and help you understand them. With so many charts ava......more