Alberto Cairo's weblog about visualization, infographics, and data journalism
Eldiario.es, an independent online newspaper based in Madrid, has just published a remarkable data-driven story about how inequality perpetuates itself (perhaps we should say that it's inflicted upon people) in Spain. Notice the combination of different types of charts —dot maps, scatter plots, stacked bar graphs,— the effective annotations and highlights that emphasize the main points of the…
I've recently appeared in a few podcasts to talk about The Art of Insight , Alli Torban's Dataviz Today , Zach Bowder's Data+Love , and Cole Nussbaumer's Storytelling With Data —hosted this time by Mike Cisneros . I very much enjoyed these conversations —I think that you'll notice that. In all of them I went way beyond the book itself. This is useful, as talking to people gives me new ideas of…
I've been so busy this year with The Art of Insight that I hadn't heard that Mona Chalabi had won a Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting . Well deserved. Here's a recent interview with her that I strongly recommend; this quote is key, I believe: “When I first started doing this, everyone was just like: what a load of bullshit. [...] Everyone else was building these really complicated data…
Some lines that I've just sent to a reporter: The Art of Insight is my most personal book to date, a tribute to the people who design infographics and data visualizations to make the world a more knowledgeable and beautiful place. After writing books about visualization from a more technical perspective ( The Truthful Art ) or to inform the general public about how we often misinterpret charts (…
Nick Desbarats is a visualization educator and consultant who has a new book coming out on November 15, Practical Charts . This is the exact same official publication date for The Art of Insight (I wrote “official” because it's already available for purchase and delivery on Amazon .) Nick and I decided to interview each other. The conversation was a lot of fun, and Nick's book is fantastic, so I…
I've just received my advance copies of The Art of Insight and I'm happy to report that it looks quite nice thanks to the good folks at Wiley . (Publication date is November 15th; if you pre-ordered it, you might need to wait a bit longer to get it.) Never in my career I've missed so many deadlines. This book sees the light of day more than two years late thanks to the endless patience of my agent…
Quick news: The Art of Insight will be released on November 15, but you can preorder it now, and you can also get a nice preview of dozens of pages through Google Books. I'll be ramping up promotional efforts soon; among them, I'm working on a redesign of my website, albertocairo.com . More updates coming soon!
I've just written the last line of The Art of Insight . Now begins the long process of copy-editing and production that will finish on November 15, 2023, its publication date. The Art of Insight is two years late. Never in my life I've missed so many deadlines (this book exists thanks to the generosity and patience of the good folks at Wiley ,) and never before I've faced a task that looked so…
In just a month I'll send last third of The Art of Insigh t to my publisher, Wiley; the publication date is still November 14 this year . If you want to get a glimpse of what my quirkiest, most personal, and most meandering book to date contains, these early blurbs might provide a few clues (more are on their way): Data visualization books don't typically transport you to new worlds. Alberto…
Tamara Munzner and I are the co-editors of CRC Press's AK Petersons Visualization series . We've got plenty of great books published recently, so we decided to record some casual conversations with their authors. Three episodes are available already, featuring Neil Richards ( Questions in Dataviz ,) Nigel Holmes ( Joyful Infographics ,) and Jen Christiansen ( Building Science Graphics .) More…
Today I'm working on the chapter of The Art of Insight devoted to Deniz Cem Önduygu . Deniz is the author of an impressive mnemonic interactive diagram of influential philosophers. He designed it for himself to summarize books he's read. For reasons that will become clear when you read the chapter (the book should be out by late November,) I'm mentioning philosopher Martha Nussbaum , particularly…
Yesterday I announced in social media that I've written half of The Art of Insight already. It should be out by late November this year. Some people asked how it's different to my previous books. It's very different —much more personal and idiosyncratic. It's both an attempt to reignite my love for the craft and also my tribute to its practitioners. In case you're interested, here's the first…
In the past few years I've become increasingly alarmed about how journalists cover the transgender community, particularly transgender youth. Being interested in graphics, I decided to record the following short and informal talk about a specific set of charts that I often see misused and even weaponized against one of the most vulnerable minorities in this country. Jon Schwabish has also written…
I'm working on the chapter of The Art of Insight about ProPublica's Lena Groeger . Here's the first rough draft of the opening paragraphs: In the Fall of 2014 Lena Groeger, the graphics director at ProPublica, emailed me to ask about a project she was working on. It was a visualization of the compensation that U.S. workers receive for damaged body parts; the amount depends on the state where the…
A week ago a large number of New York Times contributors and tens of thousands of their readers signed an open letter criticizing the newspaper's coverage of youth gender-affirming care. I was among them. I've written about these matters in the past ( here and here ,) and I'll likely keep doing so in the future. I've also argued that some reporters covering this care don't know how to reason under…
I've just finished the first draft of 2/5 of The Art of Insight . This week I'll be sending it to some friends to get some feedback. I printed it out to edit it myself. The book will be launched late in November this year. Here's a short video:
All my books contain quotes prefacing sections and chapters. These quotes are deliberately chosen to be connected to the themes I write about, or to subtly hint things without saying them explicitly. Below I've collected the quotes in the first third of The Art of Insight, which I'm finishing these days: Take advice to ditch all adverbs lightly. —Ursula K. Le Guin Enjoy and have others enjoy,…
In preparation to write a few chapters of The Art of Insight this coming week, I've been re-reading a couple of books by Robert Grudin , The Grace of Great Things and Design and Truth . Grudin's takes are a bit too Platonist for my taste, but his writings are consistently brilliant. Here are some passages from The Grace of Great Things that I underlined the first time I read it: On insight: Of all…
Nigel Holmes's Joyful Infographics is the first book I've edited for CRC Press's AK Peters Visualization Series , that I co-lead with Tamara Munzner . The second is Jen Christiansen's Building Science Graphics . Both begin shipping tomorrow, December 20th. I met Jen and Nigel nearly two decades ago at the Malofiej conference —which, by the way, will return sooner than you think. There they were,…
Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration, by Pedro Cruz The Art of Insight has a publication date: November 14, 2023 . I've been writing at a very good pace for the past few months, and the book should be finished by mid-2023. After that, it'll be sent to production and printing. Here are the people I spoke with, in rough order of appearance: Shirley Wu , Ed Hawkins , Jaime Serra , Nadieh…
While editing chapters from The Art of Insight that are already finished —more than one third of the book— I realized how many of the designers I talked to favor hand-crafted techniques versus automated or programmatic ones: Sonja Kuijpers , Federica Fragapane , even several journalists and old-timers, such as Jaime Serra . Many of them said that they experience flow while painstakingly moving,…
Some reactions to the Washington Post chart on the right, designed by my former student Luís Melgar , reminded me of a passage from The Art of Insight that I shared the other day . This morning, a few readers of this chart asked in social media: “Why isn't time on the X-axis?” implying that there's something wrong with that, as it breaks some convention or rule. A better question might be: “Can…
Every semester I teach my regular introduction to information design and data visualization class ( syllabus here .) Most students are data scientists, statisticians, engineers, interaction designers, plus a few communication and journalism majors. At the beginning of the semester, many students are wary about their lack of visual design and narrative skills, and they are often surprised at how…
Here's the rough draft of a few key paragraphs from The Art of Insight : I respect but also disagree with the Tuftean and Bertinian functionalist-realist discourse in visualization. In The infographic , Murray Dick says that the discourse I employ in all my writings—this book isn’t an exception— is pragmatist. He is correct; in fact, such label encapsulates the essence of my ideas beautifully.…
Chloe Whiteaker shares the latest project by Bloomberg Visual Data , which explains what's happening to the Mississippi river: “The Mississippi River — the immense, quiet highway that courses down the middle of America, moving critical food, wood, coal and steel supplies to global markets — is shrinking from drought, forcing traffic to a crawl at the worst possible time.” The story contains…