Thursday, August 8, 2019

First reactions to 'How Charts Lie'

How Charts Lie is two months away, and some media organizations and people who write about design, visualization, statistics, data science, etc., have already received copies of the softcover galley proofs (the actual book will be hardcover) and are reacting to it. Washington Post's Christopher Ingraham has tweeted this:



Kaiser Fung has published the first review of 'How Charts Lie'. I'm happy that people are reading beyond the intentionally provocative title, and getting what the book is truly about: it's certainly about how charts can deceive and how we lie to ourselves with them, but it's more about how anyone can become a more attentive and informed chart reader:
Few of us learned how to create charts from first principles. No one taught us about axes, tick marks, gridlines, or color coding in science or math class. There is a famous book in our field called The Grammar of Graphics, by Leland Wilkinson, but it’s not a For Dummies book. This void is now filled by Alberto Cairo’s soon-to-appear new book, titled How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information.
Finally, here are some early blurbs by best-selling authors: