Truth, beauty, and data revisited

Content for Monday, April 28, 2025–Tuesday, April 29, 2025

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)

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.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

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.

• Introduction
• Telling stories with data
• Curiosity

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Cairo, Alberto. 2016. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Berkeley, California: New Riders.

Krzywinski, Martin, and Alberto Cairo. 2013. “Storytelling.” Nature Methods 10 (8): 687–87. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2571.

Wilke, Claus E. 2018. Fundamentals of Data Visualization. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media. https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/.