ACKNOWLEDGING OUR MISTAKES, AND LEARNING FROM THEM.

I’m a bit late getting to this, as the book was published on October 15, but that’s not in any way an indication of my feelings about the latest excellent tome from my friend, Alberto Cairo (Knight Chair in Visual Communication at the University of Miami). In my opinion, everyone who is visualizing data needs to read it.

Here’s what Alberto told me last week about his main reason for writing the book:

I’ve been designing infographics for more than twenty years, and writing books about them since 2012. Recently, I’d been thinking about their common themes, and the driving forces behind them. I realized that I wrote them as if I were telling readers, “Here, these are the things that I’ve learned through study, practice and, more importantly, trial-and-error, so you don’t have to.”

“How Charts Lie,” in particular, contains tons of examples of erroneous or commonly misinterpreted graphics, and in the book I say that I think I’ve made most of the mistakes that I describe. So I know where they come from. This isn’t false modesty, but plain truth.

We celebrate our successes, so why not do the same with our fumbles? As a consequence, the book is a playful overview of graphical disasters, but also a celebration of the power that graphics have to illuminate complex information.

Below are a few of the many examples of data visualization that Alberto analyzes in detail:

A 2016 election map with results by county. Territorial voting results do not show us how many people voted for each candidate. This one is on it’s way to be hung on a White House wall. The photograph was taken by Fox News Foreign Correspondent, Trey Yingst. (@TreyYingst) https://bit.ly/34nfh3O

Corellation doesn’t equal causation. Does more smoking make you live longer?

A baseline set at zero gives a clearer impression of the difference in the numbers.

The cone of uncertainty is a frequently-misinterpreted storm warning. This is the predicted track of the aptly-named Subtropical Storm Alberto, which crossed the Gulf of Mexico in May 2018.

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/34nSEwg

A few corrections for the first edition are here: http://www.thefunctionalart.com/2019/10/how-charts-lie-few-corrections.html

EXPLAINING EXTREME METRICS.

The weight of life (above)
Vox adds it all up. https://bit.ly/2xsp908

Nigel Holmes has made many big number explanations. Here’s four examples.
We often see these mega-numbers used in the news. But do we really understand their magnitude?

A party for everyone in the world (from National Geographic magazine).

Doubling numbers gives surprising results.

Here’s Nigel’s take on the enormity of the U.S. national debt (in 2010).

World population
Seven billion and growing. An explanatory video from NPR. Click on the image to watch the video. Or here: https://bit.ly/1ikyI0f

Speed of light
James O’Donoghue (NASA) made these animations to give us a better idea of light speed.

World debt
$63 trillion, that’s all. And this is from 2017. Infographic by Visual Capitalist. https://bit.ly/2BWrArR

Cheese overload
A 1.39 billion-pound cheese surplus, visualized by Vox.

A related post, Charles and Ray Eames’ landmark “Powers of Ten:” https://wp.me/p7LiLW-21z

ANATOMICAL ART BY LISA NILSSON.

Lisa uses a technique known as quilling which dates back to the Renaissance. She rolls and shapes narrow strips of Japanese mulberry paper to create these cross-sections of the human body. See more here: https://bit.ly/2UVQ4si
Above, “Midsagittal Female.” Below, “Male Torso.”

“Shoulders” (detail).

“Coronal Man.”

Detail.

“Female Torso.”

“Abdomen” (detail).

“Transverse Head-Tongue” (detail).

“Head and Torso” (detail).

An earlier post: Sabeena Karnik uses the art of quilling to make letterforms. https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2Dl