Abstract
For an information designer and practitioner of data visualizations, Alberto Cairo has a beautiful way with words. In “The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication,” Cairo artfully expounds on the craft of data visualization with language that is accessible, weaving in vivid personal anecdotes, informative real-world examples, and practical methods and concepts drawing from a wide range of disciplines from statistics to psychology.
“The Truthful Art” is Cairo’s follow-up to his well-received book on data visualization and information design, “The Functional Art,” which published in 2012. Cairo holds the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami School Communication and has had a distinguished career as an information designer at various newsrooms. As he does in his first book, Cairo presents data visualization from a journalist’s perspective. His target audience is the reporter or designer who has no prior background in statistics or data science, but is interested in learning more about using and displaying data responsibly and effectively.
The book revolves around Cairo’s central argument that successful data visualization satisfies five criteria—that the graphic is truthful, functional, beautiful, insightful, and enlightening. His dissection of his criteria allows him to explore data visualizations in a comprehensive manner, in both conceptual and practical terms. Cairo positions data visualizations as abstractions of reality and makes a direct comparison with scientific modeling. He also discusses the fault lines in the reader’s mind in perceiving data visualizations, such as our implicit biases and our natural urge to find patterns and stories. Cairo draws on ideas in natural selection to make a point on how our brain is naturally hardwired to make connections for survivability.
Cairo includes requisite discussions on the foundational principles of visual encoding from Bertin and the research of Cleveland and McGill. He frames data visualizations as tools that enable specific tasks, an idea that he borrows from his earlier book. In between these broader concepts, Cairo tackles the nuts and bolts of basic statistics and scientific thinking. He covers the scientific method with explanations of variables, hypotheses, uncertainties, and confidence intervals. He lays out clear visual definitions for means, medians, modes, basic variance and standard deviation formulas, correlation coefficients, and measures of statistical significance. Although practical, these basic statistical explanations are less insightful (and less interesting) than his more theoretical reflections.
Cairo slips back and forth between explanations of the more math-intensive discussions and higher level concepts easily, with writing that is both intimate and visceral. In one passage, for example, he says with zest, “Once a good story takes over our understanding of something, we’ll attach to it like leeches to warm, plump flesh.” In another on the dangers of small sample sizes, he warns, “Very small samples are living bait for the demons of chance.” He pulls from diverse sources and relishes in peppering his book with colorful, memorable passages from multiple authors and scholars.
In addition to the ease of language, what makes Cairo’s book remarkable is his ability to loop in concepts from so many diverse disciplines in a coherent framework. From psychology, economics, design, or the philosophy of science, the interdisciplinary nature of the field shines through. Cairo also presents a diversity of data and visualization case studies to back up his thoughts. He leads the reader through examples that range from personal sketches for his daughter to data sets on climate change, election results, unemployment, educational achievement, housing prices, and more.
Authors write about what they know, and Cairo, as former director for Infographics and Multimedia at Época-Editora Globo in Brazil and as information designer at El Mundo in Spain, does not hide his experiences there. Brazilian and Spanish data visualization examples figure prominently throughout the book, which unfortunately are less valuable to readers unfamiliar with the language, political institutions, or geography. For example, a lengthy discussion of a workflow to visualize school test scores across Brazil depends on the reader’s recognition of two-letter abbreviations of Brazilian states, and an understanding of how the rich and poor are distributed in different regions.
Cairo’s visualization examples, though diverse, also border on the overwhelming. His dizzying march of graphics often feels rushed. It is clear that his library of data visualizations is extensive, but in his eagerness to show so many great examples, he diminishes our appreciation for each individual one. The interactive graphics, in particular, do not show off as brilliantly as Cairo describes simply because of the restrictions of the static printed page.
Despite the occasional misses in data visualization examples, Cairo’s book bridges an important gap from the research-heavy and more technical works to the non-scholarly, practical audience that has a growing interest in the collection, methodology, analysis, and presentation of data for the news. What will make this book appeal to a wider general audience is the focus on statistical and visualization basics while still being technologically agnostic. Only brief mentions of specific technologies or software packages are mentioned, such as R or ArcGIS, which help keep the focus on ideas and general methods more than execution. Those that are looking for a specific step-by-step guide to produce the gorgeous examples throughout the book, however, will be disappointed.
At the start of the book, Alberto Cairo quotes a New York Methodist pastor, who purportedly said, “the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” Cairo uses that aphorism to illustrate how good data visualizations not only expand a reader’s knowledge, but “also prompt exploration.” The more knowledge we gain, the more questions arise. Fittingly, Cairo’s book is representative of his own metaphor. “The Truthful Art” reveals the art of finding and displaying the truth and leaves readers, especially novices in the field, excited to do explorations of the expanded shoreline.