Paperback
The Truthful Art is an introduction to quantitative thinking and statistical and cartographical representation written specifically for journalists and designers. A follow-up to The Functional Art, it goes into the specifics of how to create functional charts, maps, and graphs.

Truthful Art, The, 1st Edition

Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication

$110.46

  • Paperback

    400 pages

  • Release Date

    29 February 2016

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Summary

Every day, at work, home, and school, we are bombarded with vast amounts of free data collected and shared by everyone and everything from our co-workers to our calorie counters. In this highly anticipated follow-up to The Functional Art—Alberto Cairo’s foundational guide to understanding information graphics and visualisation—the respected data visualisation professor explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics. In The Truthful Art, Cairo transforms elementary principles of data and scientific reasoning into tools that you can use in daily life to interpret data sets and extract stories from them.

The Truthful Art explains:

  • The role infographics and data visualisation play in our world
  • Basic principles of data and scientific reasoning that anyone can master
  • How to become a better critical thinker
  • Step-by-step processes that will help you evaluate any data visualisation (including your own)
  • How to create and use effective charts, graphs, and data maps to explain data to any audience

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780321934079
ISBN-10:0321934075
Author:Alberto Cairo
Publisher:Pearson Education (US)
Imprint:New Riders Publishing
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:400
Edition:1st
Release Date:29 February 2016
Weight:740g
Series:Voices That Matter
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“Alberto Cairo is widely acknowledged as journalism’s preeminent data viz wiz. He is also journalism’s preeminent data scholar. As newsrooms rush to embrace data journalism as a new tool—and toy—Cairo sets the standard for how data should be understood, analyzed, and presented. The Truthful Art is both a manifesto and a manual for how to use data to accurately, clearly, engagingly, imaginatively, beautifully, and reliably inform the public.”

- Jeff Jarvis, professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and author of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News

“A feast for both the eyes and mind, Alberto Cairo’s The Truthful Art deftly explores the science—and-art—of data visualization. The book is a must-read for scientists, educators, journalists, and just about anyone who cares about how to communicate effectively in the information age.”

- Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor, Penn State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

“If I were smarter, had more patience with academia, and had more focus, I might turn out to be more like Alberto, closer to the brilliance that he applies to the nature of information architecture. His title explains a lot: truth represents a most fundamental of attitudes, in questions asked, answers given and journeys taken. This [book] is a must on your thoughtful shelf of understanding.”

— Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Conference


“Alberto Cairo is a great educator and an engaging storyteller. In The Truthful Art he takes us on a rich, informed, and well-visualized journey that depicts the process by which one scrutinizes data and represents information. The book synthesizes a lot of knowledge and carefully explains how to create effective visualizations with a focus on statistical principles. The Truthful Art will be incredibly useful to both practitioners and students, especially within the arts and humanities, such as those involved in data journalism and information design.”

— Isabel Meirelles, professor at OCAD University (Canada) and author of Design for Information


“As soon as I started immersing myself in The Truthful Art, I was horrified (and somewhat ashamed) to realize how much I didn’t know about data visualization. I’ve spent most of my career pursuing a more illustrative way to present data, but Alberto Cairo’s clarifying prose superbly explained the finer points of data viz. Since Alberto warns us that “[data is] always noisy, dirty, and uncertain,” everyone in this business had better read his book to find out how to properly construct visualizations that not only tell the truth, but also allow us to interact meaningfully with them.”

— Nigel Holmes, founder of Explanation Graphics

“To communicate data clearly, you have to think about it clearly. The Truthful Art dives deep and provides an enlightened introduction to the ‘power tools’ of data experts: science, statistics, and visualization.”

— Fe

About The Author

Alberto Cairo

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami (UM), where he heads specialisations in infographics and data visualisation. He’s also director of the visualisation program of UM’s Center for Computational Science, and Visualization Innovator-in-Residence at Univisión. Over the past two decades, Cairo has been director of infographics and visualisation at news organisations in Spain and Brazil, in addition to consulting with companies and educational institutions in more than 20 countries.

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