OpenCourseWare on critical thinking, logic, and creativity

Pictures: pros and cons

When data are presented to an audience, whether it is on a news report or in a technical journal report, they are usually presented in the form of a diagram. Sometimes, a diagram is used simply to make the data more eye-catching; a list of numbers just doesn't grab anyone's attention. More often, though, the use of a diagram serves some further purpose. A diagram can be used to summarize large sets of data, or to focus attention on some aspect of the data, or to display a trend in the data over time. A good diagram enables the viewer to grasp in a single glance the relevant features of the data, features that wouldn't be obvious from the raw numbers themselves.

However, the power that diagrams have to give us an instant impression of the data can also be abused. Diagrams can be constructed to give the impression that the data have a feature that they don't really have. In this section, we're going to look at some common ways of pictorially representing (and misrepresenting) data. For each diagram, see if you can tell why it is misleading, and then click on "Answer".

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Subsections

• 3.1.1 Hong Kong's soaring population?
• 3.1.2 An effective campaign?
• 3.1.3 The mobile phone revolution

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