In The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications, Murray Dick offers a new cultural history of the infographic, tracing its emergence and development in Britain from the eighteenth century. The book succeeds in offering an account of an evolving media form, showing the infographic to be a contradictory tool, one developed to … Continued
Category: Data
Lessons learned from organizing the first ever virtual csv,conf
This blogpost was collaboratively written by the csv,conf organizing team which includes John Chodacki from CDL. csv,conf is supported by the Sloan Foundation and the Moore…
The public do not understand logarithmic graphs used to portray COVID-19
Mass media routinely portray information about COVID-19 deaths on logarithmic graphs. But do their readers understand them? Alessandro Romano, Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni, and Sebastián Guidi carried out an experiment which suggests that they don’t. What is perhaps more relevant: respondents looking at a linear scale graph have different attitudes and policy preferences towards the … Continued
The public debate around COVID-19 demonstrates our ongoing and misplaced trust in numbers
COVID-19 data and numbers are everywhere. However, these numbers are also a source of debate and subject to vastly different interpretations. Every day we are posed with a question that divides even epidemiologists: what does it really mean that positive cases or mortalities are up or down? Yet the media and the public reads deep … Continued
csv,conf,v5 moves online
csv,conf is a non-profit community conference run by folks who really love data and sharing knowledge. The first two years, organizers established the event’s scope…
Simple data visualisations have become key to communicating about the COVID-19 pandemic, but we know little about their impact
If you had mentioned ‘flattening the curve’ in 2019, chances are you would have been met with a blank stare. However, almost halfway through 2020, the language of data visualisation has become commonplace, and data visualisations are widely used to communicate about the pandemic to the public. However, as Helen Kennedy observes, their power to … Continued
The Locked-Down: We need more than headline statistics to understand the impact of Covid-19
For governments and individuals much of our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic has been mediated through metrics of cases and deaths and shaped by heartbreaking personal stories. In this post, Leeza Osipenko argues that such metrics only scratch the surface of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and makes the case for more expansive data … Continued
Book Review: Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice! by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
In Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic presents a new guide to data communication, featuring over 100 hands-on exercises and 250 data visualisations to help build skills in impactful data communication grounded in effective storytelling. Intended for anyone committed to improving their ability to communicate data and complemented by a website that enables users to further hone their … Continued
The Magnificent Seven: Looking Back on a Year of Exploring the Web Archives Datasets
It has been just over a year since we kicked off a deep dive into the Library of Congress Web Archives on the Signal! Now at over 2 petabytes, the web archives are a complex aggregation of interrelated web objects that make up the internet as we know it (images, text, code, audio, video, etc.). […]
Open Data Metrics: Lighting the Fire
CDL has been working to promote responsible development and use of data metrics through the Make Data Count initiative and other community projects. Daniella Lowenberg…