Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Interviews in CNN and CBC

In case you're interested, I've just been interviewed by CNN in Spanish about how to be more attentive to the graphics we're seeing these days. I went over some basics, such as verifying the sources of the data, carefully assessing what it is that graphics measure, etc. It's essentially what I explained in How Charts Lie.

I've also appeared in a piece by CBC's Roberto Rocha titled 'The flurry of daily pandemic data can be overwhelming. Here's how to make sense of it.'

I commented on Johns Hopkins University's famous dashboard of confirmed coronavirus cases. I like that visualization, and we should all praise its authors, but I have some doubts about about the decision to represent cases by country (Europe and Africa) or by province/state (the United States, China). I think this can be easily misread, as it seems that the U.S. has many more cases than it has, in comparison to Europe, for instance. This is besides a pretty common problem in proportional symbol maps like this: overlap.