No matter what your actual job title, you are—or soon will be—a data worker. 

Every day, at work, home, and school, we are bombarded with vast amounts of free data collected and shared by everyone and everything from our co-workers to our calorie counters. In this highly anticipated follow-up to The Functional Art—Alberto Cairo’s foundational guide to understanding information graphics and visualization—the respected data visualization professor explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics. In The Truthful Art, Cairo transforms elementary principles of data and scientific reasoning into tools that you can use in daily life to interpret data sets and extract stories from them.   

 

The Truthful Art explains:

 

• The role infographics and data visualization play in our world

• Basic principles of data and scientific reasoning that anyone can master

• How to become a better critical thinker

• Step-by-step processes that will help you evaluate any data visualization (including your own)

• How to create and use effective charts, graphs, and data maps to explain data to any audience

 

The Truthful Art is also packed with inspirational and educational real-world examples of data visualizations from such leading publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), Berliner Morgenpost (Germany), and many more.

Alberto Cairo (Miami, FL) teaches Information Graphics and Visualization at the School of Communication at the University of Miami since January 2012. He holds a BA in Journalism (University of Santiago de Compostela) and a research-oriented Masters degree on Information Society Studies from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona). He teaches courses on information graphics and visualization, and is interested in the convergence between Visual Communication, Journalism, and Cognitive Science.

He is author of the books Infografía 2.0: Visualización interactiva de información en prensa (Alamut, Spain, 2008) and The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization, published by Peachpit Press, a division of Pearson Education, in August 2012.

He also writes regularly for El País, the main newspaper in Spain, in a blog on the future of Journalism, Periodismo con futuro.

Between June 2010 and December 2011, he was the director for Infographics and Multimedia at Editora Globo, the magazine division of the biggest media group in Brazil, where he acted as an executive editor for the weekly news magazine Época and as an internal consultant for the other 12 publications of the group.

He has also been an assistant professor at the School of Journalism, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, between 2005 and 2009. He was the James H. Schumaker Term Assistant Professor in 2008 and 2009.

Alberto Cairo led the creation of the Interactive Infographics Department at El Mundo (elmundo.es, Spain), in 2000. Cairo’s team won more Malofiej and Society for News Design (SND) infographics international awards than any other news organization worldwide between 2001 and 2005.

Cairo has been an invited lecturer and keynote speaker at all most influential international conferences on visual journalism and design. He has taught in the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, Ukraine, Singapore, and South Korea. He has also been a consultant with many top news publications in those countries.

Preface: It All Begins With a Spark 

Introduction: The Island of Knowledge and the Shoreline of Wonder 

PART I: FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 1: What We Talk About When We Talk About Visualization 

Chapter 2: The Five Qualities of Great Visualizations 

PART II: TRUTHFUL

Chapter 3: The Truth Continuum 

Chapter 4: Of Conjectures and Uncertainty 

PART III: FUNCTIONAL

Chapter 5: Basic Principles of Visualization 

Chapter 6: Exploring Data With Simple Charts 

Chapter 7: Visualizing Distributions 

Chapter 8: Revealing change 

Chapter 9: Seeing Relationships 

Chapter 10: Mapping Data 

Chapter 11: Confidence and Significance 

PART IV: PRACTICE

Chapter 12: On Creativity and Innovation 

An Epilogue on What Lies Ahead