More than alphanumeric writing or speech, using visual rhetoric to communicate about quantity can create very, very misleading interpretations of data despite using information that is “true”.

This video is brief video (about 4 minutes) sums up some important things to look out for (mostly, size and intervals of scales on the axes and also missing data as well as contextual information needed to interpret):

How to spot a misleading graph – Lea Gaslowitz – YouTube

For your own data and any charts you might make, it will be important that you have a meaningful scale and interval for your axes AND that it is not misleading. Sometimes, that means you have to change the axis. This page explains how to do that in Excel: Change the display of chart axes (microsoft.com)

 

Task

No task on this page. Please use it as a resource for visualizations you use in the white paper and for the Data Visualization Revision assignment (more on that in a bit).

After watching the video and reviewing information on this page, click the button below to continue: