Truthful Art, The: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Voices That Matter)

✍️ Alberto Cairo

I really liked the book and the way it was written, which made it a very enjoyable read. Alberto Cairo’s writing is one of the strengths of the book.

The “The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication” goes through the different stages of data visualization. From the data collection, to the the visuals themselves focusing on guidelines and science principles that produces a good and truthful visualization. Also, concepts like p-values, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing are explained in a very clear way and without loaded maths or notation. That was a pleasant surprise for me.

The book has some valuable valuable advice on how to proceed with exploratory data analysis and the ethics of data visualization. I’ll cite a very nice quote from the book: “If getting your information right is the most important step in creating any visualization, the second one is helping the audience interpret it correctly”

There are a lot of lessons to be learned and I’ll cite three:
1) Look at the data from even more angles than you are doing now.
2) Always pay attention if the patternicity, storytelling and confirmation bugs are lurking around.
3) Talk to domain experts about the data to make sense of what the data is telling us before rushing to conclusions.

And, of course, there are a lot of cool visuals and lots of references and links to go deeper into the topics. I would definitely recommend it.