AMA Recap: Become a Better Reader & Designer of Visualizations with Alberto Cairo

We've all heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words." We believe that visualizations should "simplify information" and that they are powerful because they are “intuitive and easy to read."

But what if all of the above are myths?

During this Ask Me Anything session, Alberto Cairo (Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami), spoke on why visualizations are so often misinterpreted, and on how to become better readers and designers of charts, graphs, and maps. He took great questions from the live audience during the hour-long event. 

Alberto began his career in journalism and visualization in 1997, and has been the head of infographics and multimedia at media organizations in Spain (El Mundo online) and Brazil (Editora Globo). He is now the Knight Chair in visual journalism at the University of Miami, and also director of visualization at the school's Center for Computational Science. He is also a freelancer, trainer, and consultant for organizations and institutions such as Google News Initiative and the Congressional Budget Office.

He is the author of the books 'How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information' (2019), 'The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (2016), and 'The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (2013). Watch the embedded AMA session above or follow the link to YouTube here.

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Alberto gave a talk on this topic during our Demystifying Data Science conference in July. If you'd like to watch it in full, register for free here and receive a link via email to his and all other conference talks. 

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