Truth, beauty, and data revisited
Content for Monday, December 9, 2024–Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Readings
- Chapter 12 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
- Chapter 26 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo, “Storytelling” (Krzywinski and Cairo 2013)
- Ben Wellington, “Making data mean more through storytelling”
- Jonathan Schwabish, “Better Data Communication,” National Bureau of Economic Research
- Why People Make Bad Charts (and What to Do When it Happens)
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. All that matters is that you show good engagement with the readings.
- Why are stories so powerful?
- How are stories related to truth?
- Is it ethical to emphasize certain aspects of the facts in data more than others? How do you decide which facts to use to convince audiences?
- When you’re telling a story about data, you’re inherently manipulating audience emotions. Is that okay?
Slides
The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: