Detect Bias in Data Stories

by Jack Dougherty with Stacy Lam, and David Tatem, last updated March 17, 2017

While we like to believe data visualizations simply “tell the truth,” when you dig further into this topic, you realize that there are multiple ways to represent reality. In this chapter, you will learn how visualizations display the biases of the people and the software that create them. Although we cannot stop bias, we can teach people to look for and detect it, and be aware of our own.

Sections in this chapter:

• How to Lie with Charts, inspired by Darrell Huff (1954)
• How to Lie with Maps, inspired by Mark Monmonier (1996)

Enroll in our free online course TO DO add link, which introduces these topics in the brief video below, and offers more exercises and opportunities to interact with instructors and other learners.

Learn more

• Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (W. W. Norton & Company, 1954), http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0393070875
• Mark S. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1996), http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0226534219
• Nathan Yau, “How to Spot Visualization Lies,” FlowingData, February 9, 2017, http://flowingdata.com/2017/02/09/how-to-spot-visualization-lies/