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9+ Works 414 Members 7 Reviews

About the Author

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He has consulted with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office on visualizations. He lives in Miami.

Works by Alberto Cairo

Associated Works

The Sword of Destiny (1992) — Cover artist, some editions — 3,461 copies
Time of Contempt (1995) — Cover artist, some editions — 3,022 copies

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Common Knowledge

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male

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Reviews

This is a collection, not of data visualizations, but of visualization designers and their work. The selection is broad and varied in several dimensions: nature of topics visualized, from the largest societal challenges to the tiniest personal data pieces; visualization purpose, from communicative clarity to expressive art; visual media and techniques; level of sophistication and skill in execution. It is hard to see the book as one to read from front to back, but it certainly has inspiriing stories as well as visuals for serendipitous discovery.… (more)
 
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jonas.lowgren | Jan 10, 2024 |
Books like this about the dangers of statistical graphics for the lay readership are common enough that they have become a genre. This one is better written than most, but its a little verbose for the amount of information contained. The book itself is unusually well produced by Norton.
 
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markm2315 | 3 other reviews | Jul 1, 2023 |
As always, with Alberto Cairo, you get an entertaining, insightful, clearly-written book on the basics of data visualization, and the pitfalls that readers can encounter with charts. The stated goal is to develop the reader's graphical literary or graphicacy (a close cousin to numerical literacy and information literacy). In that goal, I would argue that book is very successful. It can be put in the hands of anyone as it is very accessible, with a lot of both serious and fun examples. In the era of fake news and distortions, it is a welcome antidote.
Which gets to my one source of irritation: Cairo's repeated assertion of his political moderation, sometimes couples with both-sides-do-it-ism. At this point in time, it is rather clear that one side has abandoned reason, logic, and basic truth-telling. This is not a case of both sides do it. And yes, we all tend to prefer charts that tell us reality is how we see it and supports our interpretation. But again, this framework does not apply to our current times of one side lying to a far worse extent, and isolating itself from anything outside Fox News.
As I said, this was my one source of irritation.
On a slightly different note: Cairo had a different publisher than for the Functional Art and The Truthful Art, and both books had better production, I thought, with softer paper and full color charts. That is not the case here. The color palette is much more limited, which is a shame when you want to show a significant number of charts.
That being said, again, a really great introductory book to the art and science of data visualization.
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SocProf9740 | 3 other reviews | Jul 11, 2021 |
I was already of the big fan of The Functional Art, Alberto Cairo's previous book, and this one is just as good, i.e., excellent. On top of it, it's a gorgeous book, with a ton of examples illustrating all the principles of data visualization Cairo explains, all in glorious colors, demonstrating the power of data visualization. Cairo weaves in some very mild statistical content in there (mostly descriptive stuff). But overall, the book is mostly about using visualization appropriate for the data, what one wants to communicate, in the most effective way. On top of it, Cairo's writing style is crystal clear, friendly, and humble, which makes this book appropriate for any audience.

This book will be my main text for the dataviz section of my undergraduate curriculum on data science.

Highly recommended. Can't wait for the next one.
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SocProf9740 | 1 other review | Jul 11, 2021 |

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Sebastião Salgado Photographer

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Works
9
Also by
2
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Rating
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Reviews
7
ISBNs
21
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